§ 45.03 STIPULATIONS OF FACT

• Jurisdiction: United States

§ 45.03. STIPULATIONS OF FACT

A trial judge will usually accept stipulations of fact between the parties.¹⁰ In an extraordinary case, however, when the purported stipulation of fact is either irrelevant¹¹ or amounts to a conclusion of law, the judge may reject the stipulation.¹² If the judge accepts the stipulation, the party who has the burden of proof on the stipulated fact is relieved of the responsibility of establishing that fact through the introduction of formal proof. In this respect, a stipulation serves a function similar to that of judicial notice.

After the judge accepts the stipulation, controverting evidence is inadmissible; and the jury will be instructed to accept the fact as established.¹³ As one court has remarked, a stipulation is considered "an express waiver . . . conceding for the purposes of the trial the truth . . . of some alleged fact. . . . [A] stipulation of facts when entered into is in lieu of testimony or evidence . . . [It is] conclusive upon both the parties and the tribunal."¹⁴ Stipulations are a type of judicial admission.¹⁵

Of course, a party is bound only by the facts specified in the stipulation. For instance, in State v. Saunders,¹⁶ the defendant stipulated merely that a government chemist had examined plant material and had found it to be marijuana. The trial judge erroneously assumed that the defense had stipulated that the marijuana had been sold by the defendant. The judge's instruction conveying that erroneous impression to the jury constituted reversible error.

Counsel may be unwilling to stipulate because a "colorless admission" will often lack the probative force of the available evidence.¹⁷ For this reason, courts often do not require the parties, typically the prosecutor, to accept an offer to stipulate; when a defendant pleads not guilty, "the State [has] the right to prove every element of the crime charged and [is] not obligated to rely on the defendant's stipulation."¹⁸ Indeed, as discussed in chapter 9, the Supreme Court, in Old Chief v. United States,¹⁹ wrote that "the accepted rule that the prosecution is entitled to prove its case free from any defendant's option to stipulate the evidence away rests on good sense. A syllogism is not a story, and a naked proposition in a courtroom may be no match for the robust evidence that would be used to prove it."²⁰ Similarly, a defendant may reject a codefendant's offer to stipulate.²¹

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^[10] See United States v. Duffy, 454 F.2d 809, 811 (5th Cir...