S. Third-party Guilt

• Library: The Criminal Law of South Carolina (SCBar) (2014 Ed.)

S. Third-Party Guilt

When a defendant raises a defense that another person committed the crime for which he is charged, there is an evidentiary threshold that must be met before the evidence is admissible.

[E]vidence offered by accused as to the commission of the crime by another person must be limited to such facts as are inconsistent with his own guilt, and to such facts as raise a reasonable inference or presumption as to his own innocence; evidence which can have (no) other effect than to cast a bare suspicion upon another, or to raise a conjectural inference as to the commission of the crime by another, is not admissible . . . . [B]efore such testimony can be received, there must be such proof of connection with it, such a train of facts or circumstances, as tends clearly to point out such other person as the guilty party.

State v. Gregory, 198 S.C. 98, 104-05, 16 S.E.2d 532, 534-35 (1941) (footnotes omitted). Long-standing rules relating to the admission of evidence that another committed the crime were the subject of a series of cases that resulted in the United States Supreme Court's decision in Holmes v. South Carolina, 547 U.S. 319 (2006).

In a...