PSYC 376 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Dying Declaration, Declarant, Moot Court
19 Apr 2017
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Document Summary
Not all child complainants are able to testify in court. The child may be too young to testify. The child may be too traumatized to testify. The alleged offence may have happened too long ago and the child has forgotten what happened. For these and other reasons, in some cases the only way the trier of fact will hear the child"s report is if it is admitted as hearsay. However, there are several legal obstacles to the admission of hearsay evidence, most of which derive from the belief that hearsay is inherently unreliable. Dunning (1999) provides a useful framework for thinking about the psychological issues concerning hearsay: fidelity and calibration. Fidelity is concerned with whether hearsay witnesses can accurately report what a child said and calibration is concerned with whether jurors can give appropriate weight to hearsay evidence. Both issues will be addressed in this unit. Hearsay is an out-of-court statement tendered to prove the truth of its contents.
