Why aren't Hannah Baker's tapes assumed to be true by dying declaration?
Related question: Why isn't Courtney Crimsen's testimony likely true simply because it's against her interest?
In 13 Reasons Why, Hannah Baker's tapes receive some suspicion of truth, accuracy or completeness. Some, like Bryce, asked questions like 'Who's gonna believe a dead girl?' while others said 'Why would a dead girl lie?'. The thing is: who isn't gonna believe a dead girl by the dying declaration rationale?
In law there is the concept of a Dying Declaration, which attributes higher truth value to testimonies made by a dying person:
The rationale, accurate or not, is that someone who is dying or believes death to be imminent would have less incentive to fabricate testimony, and as such, the hearsay statement carries with it some reliability.
Forget the legal concept a bit because I'm not so interested in admissibility of the tapes and focus more on its rationale and hence the credibility of the tapes.
So why aren't Hannah Baker's tapes assumed to be (likely) true? Why is there such a reluctance by the characters to believe her tapes? I suspect the dying declaration rationale might be N/A due either to certain events or sayings in the show that I may have overlooked or to certain legal aspects like suicide not being part of the dying declaration. In the Wiki article, I didn't see anything in the US section about suicide. I have a feeling it's inferred from somewhere that suicide doesn't count.
Best Answer
We really don't know if what Hannah said it's the honest and crude truth.
Some other character in the show said the following:
There are always 2 sides of the same story.
Hannah were speaking her truth, her side of the story. Some of her truths are real but some of another may be not all the truth, we don't know.
Your link on the Dying Declaration also tells:
Tests for admissibility of a "dying declaration"
In common law, a "dying declaration" must have been a statement made by a deceased person who would otherwise have been a credible witness to their own death by murder or manslaughter, and was of "settled hopeless expectation of death".
Was Hannah a credible witness to her own death? She was hurt of all the things others done to her so she could influence the stories to focus really on her side of the story instead of the whole picture. That's why all their friends are suspecting about her truth (and probably why the court didn't take that into account).
With a deeper search I found what I concluded in the paragraph ahead:
But is DD hearsay evidence really that bad? Do people, at the point of death, make unreliable statements? Not even modern defenders of the exception such as Orenstein try to justify the rule using scientific literature. Rather, almost all assume that there is no positive, empirical case to be made about the reliability of DD hearsay evidence.
She killed herself. Her story becomes less reliable and no one confirms all the stuff she said so it could be contradictory in the eyes of the court. Dying declarations are barely accepted on trials and once Season 2 started, the tapes were simply forgotten until Clay released them online (that didn't affect the trial).
The focus on Season 2 was showing a bigger picture of what Hannah did, and besides, if they would apply the DD it wouldn't be possible to the series having the intense drama. (I don't think it was even necessary a 2nd season..)
PS: This probably doesn't really answer fully your question but this is my point of view towards the show.
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