## Facts

- A female motorist was stopped on I-95 by a Maryland state trooper for a taillight violation; she had a learner’s permit and a licensed driver with her.
- The motorist entered the trooper’s patrol car during the stop; the parties gave conflicting accounts of why and what occurred.
- The motorist alleged the trooper handcuffed her and digitally penetrated her, then released her when she protested.
- She reported returning to her car, telling her companion, and attempting to follow the trooper’s cruiser to obtain its tag number.
- The motorist claimed the cruiser “took off with no lights at a high rate of speed,” and the Pinto unsuccessfully tried to catch up; they later used an emergency call box to contact police.
- The State offered testimony from another trooper who heard over a CB radio two unidentified speakers describe a trooper “taking off with no lights at a high rate of speed” and “that little car trying to catch up with him.”
- The defense objected that the CB statements were hearsay, improper opinion, irrelevant, and violated the Confrontation Clause.

## Issues

1. Whether CB-radio statements by unidentified declarants describing an ongoing event were admissible under the present sense impression exception to hearsay.
2. Whether the statement that a “little car [was] trying to catch up” was inadmissible lay opinion.
3. Whether the CB-radio statements were sufficiently connected to the charged events to be relevant.
4. Whether admitting the anonymous out-of-court statements violated the Confrontation Clause.

## Decision

- The Court of Appeals of Maryland reversed the intermediate appellate court and upheld the trial court’s admission of the CB-radio statements.
- The court held the statements qualified as present sense impressions despite the declarants’ anonymity.
- The court held “trying to catch up” was an acceptable spontaneous description of observed conduct, not an excludable opinion.
- The court held the statements were relevant because it was more likely than not they referred to the incident at issue.
- The court held admission did not violate the Confrontation Clause because the declarants were effectively unavailable and the statements had sufficient reliability as present sense impressions.

## Legal Principles

- A present sense impression requires (1) an essentially contemporaneous statement describing an event and (2) personal knowledge based on perception; identification of the declarant is helpful but not required.
- Conversational wording that sounds like an opinion may be admitted when it functions as a spontaneous description of what the declarant is observing.
- For relevance, the trial judge must be able to find it more likely than not that the evidence relates to the event in dispute.
- Under then-prevailing Confrontation Clause analysis, an unavailable declarant’s statement may be admitted when it bears adequate indicia of reliability; reliability may be satisfied by a firmly rooted hearsay exception such as present sense impression.

## Conclusion

The court permitted testimony recounting anonymous CB-radio observations because the statements were contemporaneous, based on apparent eyewitness perception, sufficiently tied to the incident to be relevant, and reliable enough under the present sense impression exception to satisfy Confrontation Clause requirements as applied at the time.


State v. Jones, 311 Md. 23, 532 A.2d 169 (Md. 1987)