September 7, 2018
A long raging battle in the Connecticut Superior Court is the proper procedure for “authenticating” deposition excerpts filed in support or in opposition to a motion for summary judgment. Recently in Teodoro v. City of Bristol, et al., the Connecticut Appellate Court considered, for the first time, “whether an excerpt from a certified deposition transcript must be separately certified as such, apart from the certification of the original transcript from which it was excerpted, in order to make it admissible in support or in opposition to a motion for summary judgment.”
In Teodoro, the plaintiff was a cheerleader who sustained personal injuries during practice at her high school. She subsequently brought an action against the City of Bristol, the Bristol Board of Education, and her cheerleading coach. The defendants filed a motion for summary judgment, and the plaintiff filed opposition papers. In support of their respective filings, the plaintiff and defendants both filed deposition excerpts, the cover page of the original deposition transcript, the certification page upon which the court reporter certified “the truth and accuracy of the entire deposition,” as well as the page of the transcript upon which the deponent swore that she had read the transcript and it was true and accurate. At oral argument, the trial court, Young, J., refused to consider the deposition excerpts because they were “unauthenticated” and, therefore, inadmissible evidence.
On appeal, the Connecticut Appellate Court reversed the trial court holding that “the original certification page from the original certified deposition transcript from which an excerpt was taken is sufficient to authenticate the excerpt as an accurate transcription of testimony under oath, and thus to establish its admissibility for summary judgment purposes, at least, where, as here, it is accompanied by the other portions of the original transcript tending to establish that the testimony set forth in it was given under oath and that it was accurately transcribed.” As long as these requirements are met, the Court concluded that a separate certification is not mandatory, nor does a party need to attach the entire deposition transcript.
Whether a party is moving for or opposing summary judgment, Teodoro is an important decision which has eliminated unnecessary rigidity in the admissibility of evidence in the form of deposition excerpts.