Evidence Issues Involving Children

Many years ago my colleague Janet Mason recruited me to teach about evidence issues in abuse, neglect, dependency, and termination of parental rights cases. She asked because most of the appellate law was criminal. After some grumbling, I produced a skinny 10-page paper in 2001. I’ve been adding to it ever since, and it has grown to a much longer chapter in the just-released 2017 edition of Abuse, Neglect, Dependency, and Termination of Parental Rights Proceedings in North Carolina. Although the manual is not about criminal cases, it may be helpful to those who work in the criminal courts. You can access the manual at no charge here. You can jump directly to the evidence chapter here. The manual may be helpful in general to criminal law practitioners in understanding the complicated world of juvenile proceedings (the shorthand term the manual uses for abuse, neglect, dependency, and TPR proceedings), which may parallel a criminal case when there are allegations of abuse or neglect. The evidence chapter is more directly relevant to criminal law practitioners, as it covers issues that arise in both criminal and juvenile cases, particularly evidence issues involving children. In evidence as in other areas of law, context matters. Some of the issues that are significant in criminal cases are not significant in juvenile cases. For example, the Sixth Amendment right to confrontation in criminal cases, as interpreted in the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Crawford v. Washington, doesn’t apply in noncriminal juvenile cases. The admissibility of “prior [...]