Rule 5.805 Hearsay within hearsay

Sometimes a document or statement contains one person's account of what another person said. This is called "hearsay within hearsay," and it can happen a lot with things like business records or written reports where someone writes down what another person told them.

This rule says that this kind of layered statement can still be used as evidence, but only if every single layer meets its own exception to the hearsay rule. In other words, you cannot just rely on one exception to cover the whole statement. If a report contains a statement from someone else, both the report itself and the statement inside it need to qualify under some hearsay exception.

If any layer fails to meet an exception, that part of the statement cannot be used as evidence. Courts look at each piece separately to decide if it can come in, rather than treating the whole document or conversation as one single unit.