Expert Witness Blog

Emission requirements expert Kevin Dukesherer, owner of Progressive Transportation Services and founding member of The Clean Truck Coalition, said in a July 8 Op-Ed in The Daily Breeze that “Those interested in truly helping truck drivers at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach should advocate relatively quick and easy improvements to drayage operations at marine terminals, not an act of Congress.”

Congressional Aides last week visited the Port of Los Angeles as part of a U.S. House of Representatives committee review of the Clean Trucks Program. The two-day tour, however, had little to do with their clean air achievements and instead focused on the thousands of independent owner operators hauling freight from the port, Dukesherer said.

The Clean Trucks Program has been extremely successful, reducing emissions from drayage trucks by 80 percent in just two years. Despite these results, the Teamsters union and their allies at the Port of Los Angeles continue to claim that independent owner operators can not sustain the environmental gains achieved under the program. The Teamsters have pushed for a change in federal transportation law that would give local ports the authority to regulate the trucking industry, with the goal of making it easier to organize the workforce.

Trucking expert witnesses may opine on the trucking industry and trucking and transportation rules and regulations. The American Trucking Associations website reports that:

The Missouri State Highway Patrol recently teamed up with NASCAR’s Roush Fenway Racing team and Con-way Freight to kick off a statewide safety campaign against texting while driving, according to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. The safety campaign’s logo will also be displayed on Con-way Freight’s No. 16 Ford Fusion race car driven by Colin Braun, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat said.

“Anybody can drive a vehicle if they’re focused on it 100 percent,” Braun said. “As a race car driver I don’t [text] while I’m racing, and I don’t do it in my personal car. I know I can’t do it safely, and I’ve got quick reflexes compared to a lot of people on the road.” Missouri became the 23rd state to adopt a ban on texting in August of 2009, when the state made it illegal for drivers under the age of 21 to text while driving, said the Missouri DOT website. However, the newly launched safety campaign advocates that all drivers – regardless of age – refrain from texting while driving.

Two police procedures expert witnesses with Force Science backgrounds are believed to have been influential in a jury’s recent decision to reject a murder conviction of a former transit officer accused of deliberately shooting an unarmed suspect in the back during a handcuffing scuffle.

The witnesses, Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Institute, and retired LAPD captain Greg Meyer, a certified Force Science Analyst, testified in detail how a combination of inadequate training and psychological stress phenomena most likely led to a tragic accident in which the officer mistakenly drew his sidearm instead of his X26 Taser while trying to restrain the struggling suspect. The prosecution had claimed the incident was one of intentional homicide by an out-of-control cop.

“This case,” Lewinski told Force Science News, “is a classic illustration of powerful forces beyond an officer’s conscious awareness that can shape a threatening encounter. These forces may not be readily evident even to unbiased witnesses, but in a matter of seconds they can change the lives of those involved forever.”

Metropolitan News-Enterprise reports a trial court erred in removing plaintiffs’ medical malpractice expert witness in a trial on the basis that defense counsel’s representation of the doctor 10 years earlier created an irreconcilable conflict of interest, the Fourth District Court of Appeal ruled on July 16th.

Div. Three said prophylactic removal was unnecessary where the expert waived any conflict arising out of the previous representation, so long as that waiver was unequivocal.

Orange Superior Court Commissioner Janet C. Pesak disqualified board-certified plastic surgeon John M. Shamoun from testifying against physician Mark Knight in a suit over a liposuction he performed on Laura Montgomery. Montgomery sued Knight in 2007, alleging she was injured by the procedure, and her husband, Douglas, brought a claim for loss of consortium.

Electronics expert Michael Williams testified in federal hearings that emergency alarms on board the Deepwater Horizon were disabled weeks before it exploded, killing 11 workers and spewing more than 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, is the most damning evidence yet of shoddy maintenance and compromised safety systems on board the oil rig.

Hearings conducted by a federal panel of investigators from the US Coast Guard and the department of the interior have already uncovered several incidents of apparent safety irregularities that leave both BP, the oil giant that was working the Macondo well, and Transocean, the owner of the oil rig that was operating under contract to BP, with big questions to answer.

Williams, a former Marine, managed to survive the explosion on 20 April by jumping from the burning rig. His evidence before the federal panel in Kenner, on the outskirts of New Orleans, suggested a litany of problems, from alarm systems that had been switched off to software that was so faulty the rig’s computer systems – critical for the monitoring of key safety equipment – regularly crashed.