Rule 11-805 Hearsay within hearsay.

Sometimes a witness wants to repeat a statement that itself contains another statement someone else made. This is called "hearsay within hearsay," and it happens more often than you might think. For example, imagine a witness wants to testify that "John told me that Mary said she saw the accident." That's two layers of secondhand information stacked on top of each other.

This rule says that layered hearsay like this can still be allowed as evidence, but there's a catch. Each layer of the statement has to fit into one of the exceptions that normally let hearsay into evidence. So in the example above, both John's statement and Mary's statement would each need to qualify under a hearsay exception on their own. If even one layer doesn't fit an exception, the whole statement gets blocked.

What this means for you is that just because a statement has multiple layers doesn't automatically make it unusable in court. But it also doesn't get an easy pass. The judge will look at each part separately and decide if every single piece meets the legal requirements before allowing the whole statement in as evidence.