Adopting a rule stated in a 2000 Supreme Court plurality opinion, the court today holds that a juvenile court can base a decision solely on a child’s uncorroborated hearsay statements, even if she is incompetent to testify because she’s too young to separate truth from falsehood, so long as the statements bear “special indicia of reliability.” But the court concludes — in In re I. C. — that the three-year-old’s uncorroborated hearsay statements in the case before it did not meet that standard and thus could not support the juvenile court’s determination that she had been sexually abused by her father. The court’s unanimous opinion by Justice Leondra Kruger says that “[s]ubstantial evidence is a deferential standard, but it is not toothless” and it determines that there was a “substantial gap between the indications of [the child’s] unreliability and the juvenile court’s finding that [the child’s] account was sufficiently reliable to support a jurisdictional finding.”
The court reverses the First District, Division Two, Court of Appeal, which had divided 2-1 in a published opinion.
