A frequent occurrence at trial is the offer into evidence of a document, e.g., an accident report, a medical record, a sales report, pursuant to New York’s business records hearsay exception, as codified in CPLR 4518(a), for the purpose of admitting into evidence an entry in the document consisting of information received by the maker of the record from another person which is deemed relevant in the action. In essence, the offering party is using the document to admit the information received from one who is a non-testifying witness. In these circumstances, the offer involves multiple out-of-court statements; one statement is the oral or written statement to the record-maker and the second is the record-maker’s written statement in the record describing what the person said.
Is the offered document consisting of two out-of-court statements admissible? Of course, as out-of-court statements made by a “declarant” are involved, admissibility will rest upon the proper application of New York’s hearsay rule which renders inadmissible an out-of-court statement when it is offered for the truth of the matter it asserts unless it falls within an exception to the rule, but not inadmissible when it has a non-truth purpose.See Nucci v. Proper, 95 N.Y.2d 597, 602 (2001). But how is the hearsay rule applied when the offered evidence involves multiple out-of-court statements that may or may not be hearsay? The Court of Appeals recently addressed this issue in People v. Patterson, 2016 NY Slip Op. 08582 (Dec. 22, 2016). In a carefully crafted opinion authored by Judge Leslie Stein, the court provided a method of analysis for dealing with offered evidence that consists of multiple out-of-court statements that pose hearsay concerns.
