Does the Type of Emotion Matter for the Excited Utterance Exception?

Federal Rule of Evidence 803(2) provides an exception to the rule against hearsay for

A statement relating to a startling event or condition, made while the declarant was under the stress of excitement that it caused.

Whenever I’ve taught or thought about “excited utterances,” I always think about them being made in response to a negative experience that startles the declarant. One example might be Erica shouting to her friend on her cell phone, “Oh my god! Dana just stabbed Victoria!” And, another example might be Eric telling his friend, “My head is pounding! It feels like it’s in a vice grip.” 

But the language of Rule 803(2) also seems to clearly cover positive experiences. For example, Emily might shout to her husband, “Oh my  god! I just saw that sweet kid who used to babysit for us proposing to his girlfriend.” That would seem to be no less an excited utterance than the two examples above. And such a reading is consistent with the opinion of the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas in Coble v. State, 330 S.W.3d 253 (Tex.Crim.App. 2010).

In Coble, after the defendant was convicted of capital murder, he appealed claiming that the trial court improperly allowed the prosecution to introduce a statement made more out of anger than shock. Specifically, this was a statement about the defendant peeping on the declarant, with the witness describing the declarant as “very mad and frustrated. She was red, angry.”

In rejecting the defendant’s appeal, the court held that “[t]he critical question, however, is not the specific type of emotion that the declarant is dominated by—anger, fear, happiness—but whether the declarant was still dominated by the emotion caused by the startling event when she spoke.”

-CM