Commonwealth v. Morgan

By Judge Margaret P. Spencer

On September 20, 2005, the Court denied the Defendant’s motion in limine seeking to prohibit evidence concerning any statement wherein the decedent identified his killer. The Defendant argued the statements were inadmissible hearsay because they did not satisfy the requirements of the dying declaration or excited utterance exceptions to the hearsay rule. The Court instructed counsel to brief whether the statements in question were testimonial in nature and thus precluded by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004). This letter…