United States v. De Georgia
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
420 F.2d 889 (1969)
Richard Allen De Georgia (defendant) confessed to stealing a Hertz rental car and driving it across state lines, but other evidence was needed to corroborate the confession. At trial, a Hertz manager produced regularly kept computer records showing the car was last rented on June 30, 1968, implying its later removal from the lot was theft rather than a new rental. De Georgia argued this was inadmissible hearsay because Hertz's actual recordkeepers should have testified and produced all relevant records, and separately argued the best-evidence rule required production of the records themselves rather than testimony about them.
Whether the absence of an entry in a business record designed to note every transaction of a particular kind is admissible as evidence that the transaction did not occur.