Week 5 Research Assignment According to the rules listed in article VII regarding the hearsay federal rules, writings are normally considered hearsay and are inadmissible unless they fall under an exception to the hearsay rule. Business records do not count as hearsay. For something to be a business record, it must satisfy the following, general conditions: Made in the normal course of business, relied on by the business, made at or near the occurrence of the act the record purports to record, offered through a competent witness, either the custodian of the record or another who can testify to those issues. For example network logs that are at a private company, if they are submitted as evidence that a person let’s say went to a certain site. It would then be qualified as a business record, and then it could be admitted as evidence in a court case. Like records stored on a home computer or records that are merely stored on a computer fall under the hearsay rule unless there is an exception thus as the business record rule. In order for writings, photographs, and audio recordings to be introduced as evidence and presented to a jury there are certain things that need to take place. You would need to be able to provide some type of testimony about the type of computer equipment that was used, and what type of hardware on which the evidence was created and maintained, the reliability of the equipment, the reliability of the personnel involved. You would need to make clear as to what and where the source data is. You need to specify how the records were created. You’ll need to stress what is the purpose of these records and what’s the use of these records. Finally you need to stress as to what quality checks are and were in place, etc. Under FED. R. EVID. 1008 (which is actually a specialized application of Rule 104 (b) related to relevance): A form of conditional relevance–the jury decides any