The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that although a report may be admissible as a party admission, it can be excluded under Rule 403. In Mister v. Northeast Illinois R.R. 571 F3d 696 (7th Cir. 2009), Plaintiff was injured when he slipped and fell on ice. A safety officer employed by Defendant talked with supervisors who did not witness the fall and made a report of his findings which included a statement that another employee had fallen the previous week at the same spot. The information used to make the report had been given to the safety officer by one of the supervisors who had learned it from the Plaintiff who was presumably told by the person who had fallen a week earlier. No one knew the details of that fall and the safety officer did not fall where either the Plaintiff’s or the other person’s fall had taken place.
The Trial Court refused to admit the report as a party admission under Rule 801(d)(2)(D) and also under Rule 403.
The Court of Appeals held that the Court erred in refusing to admit the report under Rule 801 since it was prepared in the usual course of business by an agent of the Defendant investigating the work accident. The Rule does not require anything else along the lines of internal verification of the report’s contents. However, the Court pointed out that this did not automatically require that the report be admitted into evidence and that after statements are classified as non-hearsay under Rule 801 the question remains whether there are other objections. The Court then said:
“Fed. R. Evid. 403 requires that a district court determine whether the prejudicial effect of admitting such evidence outweighs its probative value and thereby renders it inadmissible. Aliotta, 315 F.3d at 763. What we have here is a non-hearsay report that is derived from multiple levels of hearsay. Although the report stated that a similar fall occurred in the “same spot,” no one knew what spot. No one knew exactly where Wyman had fallen and there is absolutely no basis to conclude that Mister slipped and feel in the same location as Wyman.
Although it would have been proper to admit the report and allow Metra to expose the statement’s unreliability on cross-examination, it was not improper to find the report unreliable based on the multiple levels of hearsay and lack of precise factual statements. We find that the district court did not abuse its discretion when it barred Kroner’s report, and the accompanying testimony about its contents.” (P. 699)