Dr. Judge here. Are you smart enough to be a judge yourself? See if you can answer this bar question and we'll talk about it. A Tennessee defendant is arrested for domestic violence. His girlfriend refuses and testifies that there are no other witnesses. However, police have a 911 recording of her calling for help during the incident. The defense argues that the recording is hearsay. What should happen? This is a great question. I love it. A. The recording is inadmissible because it's hearsay. B. the recording is admissible as an excited utterance exception. C, the recording is inadmissible without the girlfriend's testimony. Or D, the recording is admissible only if police arrived during the incident. I'm going to first give you a little bit of time to answer and then we're going to cover why the answer is right and why the other answers are not right. The answer is obviously B. 911 calls made during or immediately after traumatic events especially typically qualify as excited utterances which are exceptions to the hearsay rule. Now that's not always the case but in the case of domestic violence where the girlfriend refuses to testify and there's no other witnesses then they can use the 911 call as an excited utterance even though it is hearsay. Hearsay is an outofc court statement made to prove the truth of the matter asserted in court. So, it's an outofc court statement that you intend to use in court to prove something that the statement says. [music] Most of you could say is that this 911 recording is an outofc court statement of the victim. But what the state's going to argue is one of the exceptions to the hearsay requirement, which is excited utterance. And if it's an excited utterance made during or soon after a traumatic event, it can be used as a hearsay exception and used [music] against the defendant. And that's the answer here. B, the recording is admissible because there is an excited utterance exception to the hearsay requirement. It's a really good question. It's very complicated and if you got it right, man, you're smart enough to be a judge.