Hearsay Exceptions: Res Gestae (Spontaneous Utterances)
Hearsay evidence is inadmissible for the truth of its contents unless it satisfies the principled approach to the admission of hearsay (in which both the necessity and threshold reliability of the hearsay evidence must be established) or it falls in one of the traditional hearsay exceptions, such as the res gestae exception (pronounced “res jest-eye”). The phrase “ res gestae” means literally “the thing done” and it is used in law as meaning the circumstances which are the automatic and undesigned incidents of the particular act in issue, and which are admissible in evidence when illustrative and explanatory of the act. Keefe v. State (1937), 50 Ariz. 293. The phrase is frequently applied to the statements or explanations of witnesses of the act where the act and those communications are integrated in a way which makes the communications sufficiently reliable as to permit their admission as evidence. Res gestae has been described (somewhat quaintly) as “words brigaded to ...