Commonwealth v. Brady
Commonwealth v. Brady, 507 A.2d 66 (Pa. 1986), is a case decided by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1986 which overruled close to two centuries of decisional law in Pennsylvania and established a common law exception to the rule against hearsay.
The decision stands for the proposition that the recorded, adopted statement of a witness to a crime which is inconsistent with her testimony at trial is properly admitted for both purposes of impeachment and as substantive evidence, i.e. "for its truth."[1] In Commonwealth v. Lively, 610 A.2d 7 (Pa. 1992), the rule was extended with respect to ‘‘verbatim contemporaneous recording[s] of . . . oral statement[s],’’ provided the ‘‘recordings’’ are electronic, audiotape, or videotape.[2]
References
- The Pennsylvania Rules of Evidence are available online here.
- The Federal Rules of Evidence are available here.