- No more common law rule of vouching for your own witnesses - Federal and Cali [+ most states].
- A police officer observed a gun under the driver's seat of the car Dent was driving with his girlfriend; the car was in the girlfriend's name and the prosecutor wanted to prove that the car was actually Dent's. The prosecutor wanted to bring in the grand jury testimony of the used car dealer who sold the car to Dent and his girlriend, and who was now in a foreign country. The appeal court said that the grand jury testimony should not come in for the actual criminal case, but the error was harmless.
- government chemist unable to testify personally, alternate sent in is lacking
- kind of a weird decision: the justification is that the report prepared by the engineer was not made in the normal course of business of the railroad; but the report could have easily been excluded because it was prepared by the engineer who was himself involved in the accident and therefore lacked some trustworthiness [this trustworthiness aspect is what is carried forward].
- Spot checks of computer records showed serious discrepancies, and the court properly excluded the computerized business records because of the indicia of the lack of trustworthiness.
- Court throws out dated six-prong test for admissibility of computer records that was originally formulated in the 1970s when computers were used increasingly for business records. The test was complex and stringent and was designed to assure the reliability of the computer records, but is unnecessary now when computers are regarded as generally reliable.
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