The Vermont Statutes Online
The Statutes below include the actions of the 2025 session of the General Assembly.
NOTE: The Vermont Statutes Online is an unofficial copy of the Vermont Statutes Annotated that is provided as a convenience.
Subchapter
001
:
QUALIFICATIONS, PRIVILEGES, AND CREDIBILITY
(Cite as: 12 V.S.A. § 1602)
-
§ 1602. When one party is dead or lacks capacity to testify due to a mental condition or psychiatric
disability
A party shall not be allowed to testify in his or her own favor where the other party
to the contract or cause of action in issue and on trial is dead or shown to the court
to lack capacity to testify due to a mental condition or psychiatric disability, except
as follows:
(1) To meet or explain the testimony of living witnesses produced against him or her.
(2) To meet the testimony of such deceased or party who lacks capacity to testify due
to a mental condition or psychiatric disability upon a question upon which his or
her testimony has been taken in writing or by a stenographer in open court to be used
in such action and is admitted as evidence therein.
(3) In any action in which the estate of such deceased or party who lacks capacity to
testify due to a mental condition or psychiatric disability or his or her grantee
or assignee is a party, entries in a cash or account book showing the receipt or payment
of money in due course of business, made by such party prior to his or her death or
incapacity to testify and before any controversy arose respecting the transaction
to which such entries relate, may be admitted in evidence as tending to show the facts
therein recited to be true. The adverse party in such action may meet the evidence
of such entries by any proper evidence.
(4) In addition to the right to testify, as provided in the foregoing exceptions, the
living party may be a witness in his or her own favor, so far as to prove in whose
handwriting his or her entries are and when they were made and no further, in actions
founded on book account and when the matter in issue and on trial is proper matter
of book account.
(5) In any action founded on tort, provided, however, that in tort actions by or against
representatives of deceased persons, memoranda and declarations of the deceased, relevant
to the matter in issue, may be received as evidence, and provided further, that this
provision shall not be construed as permitting testimony as to conversations with
the deceased other than to meet or explain the memoranda or declarations of the deceased. (Amended 1961, No. 166, § 1; 2013, No. 96 (Adj. Sess.), § 46.)