This rule is identical with Fed. R. Evid. 401. The rule draws upon the traditional common law definition of "relevancy," that is, "[T]he tendency of the evidence to establish a material proposition," McCormick §185; however, it is formulated to eliminate the lexically ambiguous requirement that a proposition be "material," which has been variously construed to mean "important," "necessary," "substantial," and "essential," as well as simply related to an issue in the action, see 26A Words and Phrases 212-14, 218-19 (1953). The rule actually encompasses the old materiality requirement by specifying that the "fact" to which the evidence is directed be "of consequence to the determination of the action." For this reason, the words "material" and "materiality" do not appear in these rules.
This rule restates existing Hawaii law. In State v. Smith, 59 H. 565, 567, 583 P.2d 347, 349 (1978), the court defined the concept of relevance: "Evidence is relevant if it tends to prove a fact in controversy or renders a matter in issue more or less probable." The court in Smith also relied upon the holding in State v. Irebaria, 55 H. 353, 356, 519 P.2d 1246, 1248-49 (1974), for the distinction between relevance and sufficiency of the evidence:
The concept of relevance, however, does not encompass standards of sufficiency. Appellant's contention that evidence which, standing alone, is insufficient to establish a controverted fact, should be inadmissible is totally without basis in the law. It is often said that "[a] brick is not a wall." ...Appellant through a "sufficiency" standard would take away the building blocks of a prima facie case. The sufficiency standard should apply only when all the bricks of individually insufficient evidence are in place and the wall itself is tested.
This rule preserves the Irebaria distinction between relevance and sufficiency by establishing, as the requisite standard of probability, that the consequential fact be rendered "more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence." As the Advisory Committee's Note to Fed. R. Evid. 401 put it: "Any more stringent requirement is unworkable and unrealistic.... Dealing with probability in the language of the rule has the added virtue of avoiding confusion between questions of admissibility and questions of the sufficiency of the evidence."
