Indeed, Judge Tamm's observations about an equally intractable issue in his concurring opinion in United States v. The question when evidence of a particular criminal act may be admitted is so perplexing that the cases sometimes seem as numerous as the sands of the sea and often cannot be reconciled. It is hopeless to attempt to reconcile the precedents under the various heads, for too much depends on the tendency of the court in dealing with a flexible principle. A generation has elapsed since then, but those who wrote the current edition of the leading treatise on evidence continue to lament that MORGAN, MAGUIRE & WEINSTEIN, EVIDENCE: CASES and MATERIALS, 380 (4th ed.
No part of the law of evidence is more consistently and violently litigated than that having to do with the admissibility of proof of other criminal acts. Attys., Washington, D.C., were on the brief, for appellee.īefore MACK, FERREN and SCHWELB, Associate Judges.Īlmost half a century ago, long before Glasnost and Perestroika, a famous statesman with a gift for words described the Soviet Union as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." The future prime minister's description of a then inscrutable nation would have been, and would remain today, an apt appraisal of the state of the law pertaining to the admission of proof of "other crimes." When the writer of this opinion first studied evidence more than thirty years ago, he was warned by the authors of his casebook that Atty., at the time the brief was filed, and Michael W. Holt, Silver Spring, Md., appointed by this court, for appellant.
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