I Object!

It’s a favorite moment in tele­vi­sion shows and movies about legal pro­ceed­ings. Ten­sion builds , tem­pers flare and (usu­ally after some raised voices) our pro­tag­o­nist legal coun­sel leaps to his or her feet and screams, “I object!” Whether it’s Daniel Kaf­fee in “A Few Good Men” or Vin­cent Gam­bini in “My Cousin Vinny,” the moment where that objec­tion is raised is often a cli­max in the storyline.

What does it mean? I know that I object to peo­ple wear­ing flip-flops when they’re not on the beach. I object to restau­rants that put bread­ing on chicken wings. I object to tele­vi­sion news­cast­ers who use the phrase, “how it all went down.” But just what are these lawyers object­ing to in court?

Court pro­ceed­ings are not a free-for-all. The Amer­i­can judi­cial sys­tem has, over the course of two cen­turies, taken the British under­pin­nings that it inher­ited and formed a series of rules that seek to make the pro­ceed­ings fair for both sides and to aid the court in find­ing the truth. Some of those rules are pro­ce­dural, some apply to spe­cific types of courts and oth­ers apply to spe­cific parts or types of pro­ceed­ings, such as the rules of evidence.

Evi­den­tiary rules vary depend­ing on the type of hear­ing and the juris­dic­tion in which the case is being heard. Each state has its own set of evi­dence rules and the fed­eral court sys­tem oper­ates on yet a dif­fer­ent ver­sion. That being said, those dif­fer­ing sets of evi­den­tiary rules are very sim­i­lar and legal advo­cacy groups develop model rules that they rec­om­mend states and the fed­eral gov­ern­ment adopt. Those evi­dence rules gov­ern who may tes­tify, what is rel­e­vant, what con­sti­tutes hearsay, what qual­i­fies one to be an expert wit­ness, what basic things a court may take notice of, how doc­u­ments can be admit­ted into the record and much more.

The rules of evi­dence are so impor­tant to judi­cial pro­ceed­ings that courses on evi­dence typ­i­cally run for the entire first year of law school. Judges and attor­neys, who are required to meet a con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion require­ment, fre­quently attend sem­i­nars to refresh their knowl­edge of the rules and to keep up on changes that come from rule amend­ments and from judi­cial deci­sions that inter­pret how the rules are to be applied.

When an attor­ney objects in a case, he or she is usu­ally telling the judge or mag­is­trate that they believe the other side has done or is attempt­ing to do some­thing in vio­la­tion of the rules. The attor­ney may be try­ing to intro­duce evi­dence that is irrel­e­vant, admit a doc­u­ment that has not been prop­erly iden­ti­fied or stray into an area of tes­ti­mony that is sim­ply impermissible.

One evi­dence rule gen­er­ally pro­vides that a person’s prior con­vic­tions for crim­i­nal offenses are not admis­si­ble on a later charge unless cer­tain con­di­tions are met. The the­ory behind the rule is that a jury might sim­ply con­vict a per­son on the basis that they had pre­vi­ously com­mit­ted a crime, even if there was insuf­fi­cient evi­dence on the cur­rent offense. If a wit­ness divulged the prior con­vic­tion dur­ing tes­ti­mony, the defendant’s attor­ney would object. In some sit­u­a­tions like that, the vio­la­tion is so severe that a mis­trial might result.

My first expe­ri­ence in a court­room was nearly foiled by an evi­dence rule I didn’t know. I was a third year law stu­dent and han­dling a juve­nile traf­fic case. I had the offi­cer on the stand, but every time I tried to ask him a ques­tion the attor­ney for the juve­nile objected. I was com­pletely clue­less as to why. For­tu­nately for me, the attor­ney in ques­tion was one of Delaware’s finest lawyers, Keith Boger. After four or five objec­tions, Keith kindly pointed out to me that I neglected to ask the offi­cer if he was in uni­form and dri­ving a marked cruiser on the day he issued the ticket.

Because Ohio law does not allow offi­cers in unmarked cruis­ers to issue traf­fic cita­tions, evi­dence rule 601© pro­vides that the offi­cer must have been in uni­form and in a marked cruiser in order to tes­tify about the traf­fic stop. I asked the ques­tion and we moved on to the sub­stance of the case.

The full text of the Ohio Rules of Evi­dence can be found on the web­site of the Supreme Court of Ohio at supremecourtohio.gov.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Aug 11 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.