Ruling on an issue of first impression, Washington state’s high court has decided that the business-records exception to the hearsay rule applies to a drug-testing center’s observational “incident report” that indicated a father, who later lost his parental rights, was possibly trying to provide a urinalysis sample that wasn’t his.
“The incident report in this case relied on personal observations” of a testing-center employee “as opposed to the kind of purely clerical or bookkeeping records or scientific test results our courts traditionally have deemed admissible under RCW 5.45.020,” which is the state’s law on business records as evidence, wrote a majority of the Washington Supreme Court justices.
