State v. Farrar

• Court: Louisiana Supreme Court
• Writing for the Court: DENNIS
• Citation: State v. Farrar, 374 So.2d 1204 (La. 1979)
• Decision Date: 04 September 1979
• Docket Number: No. 63988,63988
• Parties: STATE of Louisiana v. Neal Edward FARRAR.

Page 1204

374 So.2d 1204

STATE of Louisiana v. Neal Edward FARRAR.

No. 63988.

Supreme Court of Louisiana.

Sept. 4, 1979.

Gilmer P. Hingle, Smith & Hingle, Monroe, for defendant-appellant.

William J. Guste, Jr., Atty. Gen., Barbara Rutledge, Asst. Atty. Gen., J. Carl Parkerson, Dist. Atty., Kenneth A. Rains, Asst. Dist. Atty., for plaintiff-appellee.

DENNIS, Justice.

In this criminal appeal, the defendant, who was convicted of simple arson and sentenced to nine years at hard labor, contends the trial judge erred by preventing the introduction, as evidence of insanity at the time of the offense, of written reports prepared out of court by members of a sanity commission. We affirm. The code of criminal procedure, which permits introduction of such reports in pretrial mental capacity proceedings, does not authorize their admission during trial as an exception to the rule excluding hearsay evidence.

Defendant, Neal Farrar, was accused of burning the Corinth Baptist Church in Morehouse Parish on the night of May 2, 1977. He was discovered about two hundred yards from the church, shortly after the fire began, in possession of incendiary agents. He was arrested and soon thereafter confessed to the crime.

Before trial, on defendant's motion, the court ordered a mental examination and appointed a sanity commission. The reports filed with the court by the members of the commission indicated that defendant was psychotic. After a hearing, the court determined that he lacked the mental capacity to proceed and transferred him to a state hospital for treatment. Six months later, however, after holding a hearing and receiving reports from a second sanity commission, the court found that defendant had regained his mental capacity to proceed.

During trial, the written reports prepared out of court by two members of the first sanity commission, who did not appear as witnesses, were offered for introduction by the defendant. The reports were excluded, however, by the trial judge as inadmissible hearsay and irrelevant evidence.

The crucial issue of law presented is whether there is any authorization for the admissibility at trial, as an exception to the hearsay rule, of a sanity commissioner's written out of court statement. Since it is decisive, we do not consider whether the evidence was relevant.

The commissioners' out-of-court statements were correctly excluded by the trial judge because they were hearsay statements which did not fall within any exception to the rule prohibiting such evidence. Hearsay evidence, briefly and simply defined,...