Colorado v. Vanderpauye
Annotate this CaseThe common law prohibited anyone with a “direct pecuniary or proprietary interest” in the outcome of a case, including a party, from testifying. Given the direct-interest doctrine, courts also customarily precluded a party’s self-serving hearsay statements. The direct-interest doctrine was abrogated by statue throughout the country, however, Colorado law had no per se rule excluding a self-serving hearsay statement by a defendant. Instead, the Colorado Supreme Court held that, like any other hearsay statement, a defendant’s self-serving hearsay may be admissible if it satisfies a hearsay-rule exception in the Colorado Rules of Evidence. In this case, the district court determined that a hearsay statement by the accused, Jacob Vanderpauye, was automatically inadmissible because it was self-serving. In the alternative, it found that Vanderpauye’s hearsay statement did not meet the excited utterance exception to the hearsay rule. A division of the court of appeals disagreed on both fronts and reversed the judgment of conviction. To this, the Supreme Court affirmed: (1) the self-serving nature of Vanderpauye’s hearsay statement didn’t render the statement automatically inadmissible; (2) the statement, though self-serving, fit within the scope of the excited utterance exception because it was a spontaneous reaction by Vanderpauye to a startling event that rendered his normal reflective thought processes inoperative; and (3) the district court’s error in excluding the statement was not harmless. The case was returned to the district court for a new trial.
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