Hearsay Heresy

The words that could not be spoken

For a layman looking back on Jason Tibbs’s 2014 trial for the murder of Rayna Rison, nothing was more shocking than the evidence that the jury was not allowed to hear. During the 1993 homicide investigation, police quickly cleared Jason as a suspect because he had several alibi witnesses who reported he was in a trailer park on the other side of town when Rayna was abducted from her after-school job. Twenty-one years later, the prosecutor called these witnesses to the stand. They honestly admitted they didn’t remember everything that happened one Friday night so long ago. But the judge wouldn’t let them or the jury see what they told the police at the time of the crime, ruling those statements were “hearsay,” the legal equivalent of rumor –unless the officers who wrote the reports took the stand. Likewise, the judge ruled out a statement from the victim herself when, at the age of thirteen, she was impregnated by her brother-in-law, Ray McCarty. When he assaulted her, the statement read, “[McCarty] said if I ever told, he would kill me.” Some judges may have ruled the document as a “hearsay exception” since Rayna signed it with the stipulation that it was the “truth to the best of your knowledge,” and it was cosigned by the detective who recorded the statement and her parents as witnesses. But unless Rayna was present to affirm the statement, the judge ruled, it was hearsay and could not be presented to Jason’s jurors.