State v. Segerberg

The defendant was charged in two counts with committing indecent assaults upon an eight-year-old girl. The state offered the child as a witness, but the trial court refused to allow her to testify because of her immaturity and lack of appreciation of the meaning and sanctity of an oath. Thereupon the state called as witnesses the child’s mother, her stepfather, a state policewoman and a state policeman, and they testified, against the objection of the defendant, to conversations they had had with the girl, in the absence of the defendant, in which she recited to them the details of the…