Justice Robert D. Rucker ended his decades-long legal career in 2017 with his retirement from the Indiana Supreme Court. Justice Rucker came to the supreme court after serving eight years as a judge on the Indiana Court of Appeals. His elevation to the supreme court in 1999 still stands as the most recent occasion a court of appeals judge was selected for Indiana’s highest court. (Prior to Justice Rucker, the most recent judge to hold that honor was Justice Donald Mote, who was elevated from what was then known as the Indiana Appellate Court in 1966 into the then-elected position of supreme court justice.)
The focus of this survey is upon developments in Indiana’s evidence law spanning the period from October 1, 2016 through September 30, 2017. In keeping with the consistent practice of this survey since the 1996 installment, the topics for discussion shall be addressed in the same order as the Indiana Rules of Evidence.
This Article focuses on opinions from the Indiana Supreme Court and many of the significant opinions from the Indiana Court of Appeals, on a wide range of [criminal law and procedure] issues that affect cases from their beginning to end.
On April 21, Governor Eric Holcomb signed into law an enactment of the General Assembly that Secretary of State Connie Lawson called “the most farreaching revision of Indiana business laws in more than two decades.” The new act consolidates in a single place in the Indiana Code and harmonizes certain administrative provisions and provisions governing transactions that had previously been contained in five different business entity statutes. Although the new law does not bring about much substantive change, it contains an unprecedented amount of procedural simplification.
There are many things to enjoy about spending time at a lake: teaching one’s kids to waterski, taking long pontoon boat rides, playing the Beach Boys’ greatest hits on repeat, floating around on a raft, and, of course, cornhole—Indiana’s true pastime.
Unfortunately, no matter how fast you run to your car at 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon to beat the weekend traffic or how far you travel to “your” lake, legal challenges may follow you.
After years of disclosure of forensic frauds, discrediting of previous forensic techniques, and exonerations of innocents incarcerated for crimes they did not commit, in 2009, at the behest of Congress, the National Academies of Science published a thoughtful, but devastating critique of the practice of forensic science in the criminal courts of the United States.
During recent decades, the teaching and discussion of Evidence law have come to focus almost entirely on the topics covered by the Federal Rules of Evidence and their state equivalents. Just as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure caused teachers and scholars to focus on what they cover, the Federal Rules of Evidence have come to define our understanding of what Evidence law is about.
