WHILE SOME PEOPLE MAY 'CONFESS' ON THEIR DEATH BEDS, DOES SAME HAVE EVEN AN IOTA OF LEGAL SIGNIFICANCE?

For Federal and the laws of  most states, only if as the dying expire they utter WHO KILLED THEM is the dying declaration allowed into court and given weight.  OTHERWISE, all such 'death bed confessions' {really called "dying declarations"} are EXCLUDED as hearsay.

In UFOLOGY there are sooooooo many so-called death bed confessions {again, more properly as 'dying declarations'}, but in a court of law such confessions are given no -- zero, nada, niente -- inherent weight or credence.  If, on my death bed, I 'confess' that I worked for the most secret government agency -- so secret it doesn't even have a name! -- and the secret we were hiding is that the moon is, in fact, made of green cheese ... I fear how many people in UFOLOGY might give that ... no, I doubt even a single UFOLOGIST would give my hypothetical  death bed confession any credence.  I think.

"Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, a dying declaration is admissible if the proponent of the statement can establish:

1. Unavailability of the declarant -- this can be established using FRE 804(a)(1)-(5);
2. The declarant’s statement is being offered in a criminal prosecution for homicide, or in a civil action;
3. The declarant’s statement was made while under the belief that his death was imminent; and
4. The declarant’s statement must relate to the cause or circumstances of what he believed to be his impending death.

The declarant does not actually have to die for the statement to be admissible, but there must be a genuine belief that death was imminent and the declarant must be unavailable to testify in court. If the stipulations cannot be met, it would then constitute hearsay and not fall into the exception. As with all testimony, the dying declaration will be inadmissible unless it is based on the declarant's actual knowledge.

Furthermore, the statement must relate to the circumstances or the cause of the declarant's own death. A counterexample is the dying declaration of Clifton Chambers in 1988, in which Chambers confessed that ten years earlier, he had helped his son bury a man named Russell Bean, whom the son had killed by accident. The statement was sufficient cause to justify a warrant for a search on the son's property; Bean's body was indeed found, but there was no physical evidence of a crime after ten years, and since Chambers was not the victim, his dying declaration was not admissible as evidence, and the son was never brought to trial.

In U.S. federal courts, the dying declaration exception is limited to civil cases and criminal homicide prosecutions. Although many U.S. states copy the Federal Rules of Evidence in their statutes, some permit the admission of dying declarations in all cases."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_declaration



-- Louis Sheehan