Last Words

It was odd for a man to be pacing around his front yard in the wee hours of a chilly October morning. As Seattle police and paramedics pulled closer, however, they noticed something even stranger: The pacing man, 29-year-old Donyea Jones, was burned so badly, the flesh was literally melting off his frame. "My wife poured gasoline on me and lit me on fire," he explained calmly before being rushed to nearby Harborview Medical Center, where he died of his injuries several hours later.

Tonya Michelle Jones, who'd called 911 at least four times, was arrested at the scene. The pair had apparently been fighting for days over Donyea's alleged infidelity, and they were no longer sleeping in the same bedroom. The night before, when he was high on marijuana, Donyea had threatened Tonya with a gun. Tonya pled not guilty to her husband's murder, insisting that Donyea must have tried to incinerate her as she dozed after drinking heavily. Perhaps, she said, he'd spilled gasoline on himself accidentally and then, stopping to enjoy a cigarette before carrying out his murderous deed, set himself ablaze.

Physical evidence implicating Tonya was scarce. But the prosecution had something even more powerful at its disposal: Donyea's deathbed statement that his wife had done him in. Technically hearsay, since Donyea couldn't take the witness stand, the accusation was admissible as the "dying declaration" of a murder victim -- under an exception to the rule that keeps most hearsay testimony out of court. A police officer who had interviewed Donyea at the hospital testified about what he had said, sealing Tonya's conviction for second-degree murder in November 2000.

Lorraine Roberts, Tonya's attorney, was distressed that the jury would take Donyea, through the police officer, at his word. The dead man had a history of beating his wife and of attempting suicide, and he had allegedly changed key details of his story several times in the hours before his death -- sometimes Tonya tossed the gasoline as he was walking away from her, other times he was sitting on a bed. "But it was extremely difficult for these jurors to get past, 'Why would anybody say something like that if it weren't true?'" Roberts said. "We had no one to cross-examine.... There was absolutely no way to fight this. It's probably one of the worst things that can happen to a defendant."

Countless detective novels and Matlock reruns hinge on the accusatory words of a murder victim, choked out as life ebbs away. Staring eternity in the face, could someone like Donyea Jones be vindictive enough to leave a legacy of vengeance by accusing an innocent person of murder? Most people seem to believe the answer is no. After all, Christianity teaches that St. Peter shoos away liars from the gates of heaven, perhaps strengthening our conviction that a dying person just wouldn't fib.

That thinking is as archaic as the medieval English courts where the principle of Nemo moriturus praesumitur mentiri -- a dying person is not presumed to lie -- originated. During the 12th-century reign of Richard the Lionhearted, when Christianity infused daily life, courts may have been justified in assuming that murder victims would be afraid to risk God's wrath by uttering false last words. In a secularized modern America, however, as Charles W. Quick noted in a classic article on dying declarations, "Anger, wish for revenge, and plain