Party Admission Lets You Testify
Video Transcribed: When can you talk about things someone else told you on the stand? My name is Brian L. Jackson. I’m a Tulsa fathers rights attorney here with Dads.Law, where fathers are not disposable. And I would like to talk to you guys today about a couple of exceptions to the hearsay rule.
One of the really big ones that are a constant in court is the party admission/statement against interest rule. And that is, is basically the idea that if the opposing party says something to you about the case or about facts that are relevant to the case, you can usually testify to it because it’s party admission. You can testify to statements that are being presented for something other than the truth of the matter because that’s outside the hearsay rule. You can testify to things you were told in the course of diagnostics in a medical setting if it was information given for the purposes of diagnosis.
And there’s… You can also testify to, in some limited circumstances, child hearsay. And there’s a procedure for that, which is somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion. But you can sometimes testify to that. Present sense exception is when somebody is, just to give an extreme example, if they drop their hand in a vat of boiling oil and screaming, “Oh, shit. I dropped my hand in a vat of boiling oil,” as it’s happening. That’s an exception. And those are just some examples.
Generally, hearsay is not admissible, but there are a few examples of when it can become admissible. And that’s something that you really want to consult with a good lawyer about if there’s some particular statement that you feel like a court needs to hear about as to how best to get that information before the court.
If you need a good Oklahoma court lawyer to do such a thing, well, one place you could find one is at Dads.Law, where fathers are not disposable.
