so in our last video we looked at at the rules that established relevance 401 and 402 and they established the fairly obvious abstract notion that those things which are relevant are admissible and those things which are irrelevant are inadmissible subject to certain other constraints like you know fourth amendment exclusionary rule or privileges or other things we'll come to later later in class but we're looking at that at a high level of abstraction uh we saw the rule and we'll go to the rule actually i'll share my screen and take us take us there and that takes us back to chart of course and we'll go to relevance and we'll look again at 401 and 402 and and there we see that corso rule is evidence is relevant if it has any tendency to make a fact more or less likely and that fact has to be of consequence but we want more than that we want we want some sense of what this abstract principle looks like on the ground so as you're doing all your law school classes we're going to look at we're going to look at specific facts and this is the case of state versus newman the very first case you'll read in in charter course and in in people versus or rather state versus newman uh the question in this case is whether a defendant who is uh who is accused of dui has the right to present the testimony of a doctor who will say that it is theoretically possible for a person to sleep drive sort of like sleep walking the defendant wants to claim that it is theoretically possible that sound asleep he got in his car and drove now the problem for the defendant was that he was also drunk so if if sleep driving is not a defense he's going to be convicted of dui but he claims that if he did so while he was asleep even though he was drunk then he did not commit this act and so the question the court has to ask is not whether this makes a fact more or less likely the doctor is testifying that it is possible that that that sleep driving could happen so the possibility of sleep driving goes up as a result of the doctor's testimony or the doctor's testimony makes it more likely that the jury would find that that sleep driving occurred in this case because they now learn it is a possibility but the question is not that the question is the second half of rule 401 is it a fact that is of consequence to the issue that that sleep driving could have occurred does it matter at all that the defendant might have been drunk and asleep as opposed to just drunk and driving if he's drunk and asleep is that a defense to dui and as you'll learn when you read the the case of state versus newman the court says yes and they arrive at that conclusion from something that you learned first year in criminal law with rare exceptions by a voluntary act is an unwritten requirement of most criminal statutes so so unlike things like failure to file your income tax that that actually creates a crime of omission dui is like most every other crime like murder or rape or robbery or burglary that requires an affirmative voluntary act so if he was asleep he could not have committed that affirmative act of voluntarily driving a car while he was drunk he did drive the car and he was drunk but if he did not do so voluntarily the court holds that that would in fact exonerate him of of this crime so sleep driving is a fact that is of consequence and that's what the court holds in in state versus newman and so as you see here you have to look at you have to look at what the elements of the lawsuit are what is it that the prosecution or the plaintiff has to prove and we look there to determine what those facts are that are of consequence what made it complicated in state versus newman was the fact that that when you look at the dui statute the dui statute did not actually say and by the way you have to be awake so so the court had to look at what is implicit in this statute to determine which facts were at issue and the voluntariness of the defendant's actions were in fact at issue uh and so therefore the possibility that he was asleep is an issue for the litigation as the court then ruled in state versus newman and in our next our next video we'll look at the next case a hawaii case uh on on whether the reason an officer pulls someone over for dui is a fact at issue you