## Facts

- Dedrick Griffin was charged with two counts of second-degree murder for the shootings of Patrick Parker and Tiche Carter.
- A police report reflected that William Thomas told investigators Carter entered Thomas’s apartment after being shot and said “Dennis shot me.”
- Thomas died five days before trial and could not testify.
- Griffin moved to (1) declare Thomas unavailable and (2) admit the police-report account of Thomas’s statement (containing Carter’s statement) under the dying-declaration hearsay exception.
- The proffered evidence involved hearsay within hearsay: Carter’s identification of the shooter to Thomas, and Thomas’s relay of that statement to police as recorded in an investigative report.

## Issues

1. Whether Carter’s identification of the shooter, offered through Thomas’s statement recorded in a police report, qualified as a dying declaration.
2. Whether the double-hearsay statement was admissible when the proponent did not establish a hearsay exception for each level of the combined statements.

## Decision

- The Louisiana Supreme Court reversed the trial court’s ruling admitting the statement as a dying declaration and remanded.
- The record did not establish the required foundation that Carter made the statement while believing death was imminent.
- The lower courts failed to analyze and justify admissibility at both hearsay levels; the dying-declaration theory did not resolve the outer layer (Thomas’s statement to police as recorded in a report).

## Legal Principles

- The dying-declaration exception requires a foundation showing the declarant is unavailable, believed death was imminent when speaking, and the statement concerns the cause or circumstances of the impending death.
- For hearsay within hearsay, each layer must independently satisfy a hearsay exception; a valid exception for the inner statement does not automatically admit the outer statement.
- Courts must identify the relevant “declarant” for the exception and ensure the foundational requirements are satisfied on the record before admitting the evidence.

## Conclusion

The court held that a police-report account of a victim’s identification of the shooter could not be admitted as a dying declaration where the record did not show the victim spoke under a belief of imminent death and where the proponent failed to establish a hearsay exception for each level of the double-hearsay statement.


State v. Griffin, 783 So. 2d 1241 (La. 2001)