Expert Witness Blog

The judge in Phil Spector’s murder trial ruled that forensic scientist expert witness Henry Lee removed something from the scene where actress Lana Clarkson was shot and withheld it from the prosecution. Lee has previously testified in the high profile cases of O.J. Simpson, William Kennedy Smith, Kobe Bryant, JonBenet Ramsey, Scott Peterson, Chandra Levy, Michael Skakel, Vincent Foster and the Branch Davidian compound fire.

Dr. Lee has a lot to lose here,” said Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler, casting doubt on the expert’s credibility.

Judge Fidler heard testimony from several witnesses on the mystery of a piece of fingernail missing from the crime scene. Lee’s expert witness testimony is expected to interpret blood spatter patterns supporting the claim that Clarkson killed herself in Spector’s home reports CNN.com.

Judge Elizabeth Thomakos will allow no child abuse expert witness to use the term Shaken Baby Syndrome in the Marsha Mills murder trial, beginning next week in New Philadelphia. According to the TimesReporter.com:

Thomakos explained the expert witnesses presented by the prosecution will not be permitted to give an opinion that the child was diagnosed with Shaken Baby Syndrome, will not be allowed to testify Mills shook him and will not be permitted to comment on whether Mills was truthful in her version of events….Thomakos used a recent decision by the Ohio Supreme Court in a case involving Battered Woman’s Syndrome to evaluate the admissibility of expert testimony. She decided that should Steiner testify the boy died from Shaken Baby Syndrome, he would take away the role of the jury in determining Mills’ credibility. The testimony of the expert could cause a juror to conclude the expert believed the defendant is guilty.

The Maryland Supreme Court agreed with the Court of Appeals unanimous decision that a Frye-Reed hearing is necessary to determine the validity of expert witness testimony in the case of Josephine Chesson, et al. v. Montgomery Mutual Insurance Company. The plaintiffs, employees of Baltimore Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church in Columbia, claim they suffer a disease known as “sick building syndrome” because toxic mold was found behind a wall. “sick building syndrome” expert witness Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker testified on their behalf. LegalNewsline.com stated that:

Defense counsel argued that a hearing should have taken place to determine if Shoemaker’s beliefs regarding sick building syndrome are widely accepted, a practice established in 1978’s Reed v. State decision and designed to determine the admissibility of an expert’s testimony. It interpreted a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from the 1920s.

Justice Irma Raker wrote. “We shall hold that the expert’s testimony should have been the subject of a Frye-Reed hearing.”

Lisa Handley, political scientist statistics expert witness for the federal government, testified in the 2007 Port Chester mayoral election voting-rights trial. Handley said:

She is very confident that the village election system dilutes the Hispanic vote and testified that there is an overall pattern of racially polarized voting in the village.

According to Lower Hudson Online, expert witness Handley analyzed 16 elections and concluded that the candidate preferred by Hispanic voters was defeated in 12 of those races.

The perjured testimony from Joseph Kopera, Maryland’s police ballistics expert witness who killed himself this month after being confronted with evidence that he had falsified his credentials continues to affect the cases in which he testified.

Maryland prosecutors and defense attorneys have said that revelations about Kopera’s falsified credentials could force new trials for some of the hundreds of people he helped convict in a career that spanned nearly four decades.

As reported in the Baltimore Sun, one defense attorney stated: “The point is not that the jury might have evaluated his conclusions differently if they had known that his knowledge was based only on ‘on the job training,’ although that is certainly a possibility. Rather, the point is that once a jury is aware that a state’s expert has utterly failed to abide by the oath given to all witnesses, the jury reasonably can conclude that the witness has little regard for the truth.”

Robin Clifton’s 21-day arson trial, for which 800 potential jurors had been called, has been postponed for an expert witness to continue preparing. Stephen B. Spies, a retired special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, is the arson expert witness mentioned in the motion. Clifton is accused of setting four fires on Sept. 5, 2005, two of which destroyed the Rifle Amoco station. He allegedly set other fires at a restaurant and a townhouse under construction.

According to the Post Independent, the size of the jury pool was a result of heavy pretrial publicity of the case and the anticipated length of the trial. Clifton had sought unsuccessfully to have the trial moved elsewhere because of the amount of local media attention the case had received.

Former FBI fingerprint expert witness testified that terrorism suspect Jose Padilla’s fingerprints match at least seven of 45 latent prints found on an alleged application for Al Qaeda holy war training.

Padilla and his two codefendants are charged with conspiracy to kill, kidnap or maim people abroad and with providing material support to terrorists. Padilla was accused after his May 2002 arrest of plotting to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a U.S. city. But Padilla’s public defenders cast doubt on the validity of both the prints and the so-called mujahedeen data form, a cornerstone of the government’s case. The form has been described by other expert witnesses as a “pledge” to fight on behalf of beleaguered Muslims abroad.

Padilla’s questioned the thoroughness of the evaluation, asking expert witness Morgan why he hadn’t sought a broader set of the defendant’s prints, according to the latimes.com.

On January 30, 2007, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that plaintiffs’ epidemiology expert witness Dr. Richard Allen Lemen presented scientifically reliable, and therefore legally admissible, evidence drawing a causal connection between mesothelioma and inhalation of brake-lining dust. Chapin v. A&L Parts, et al., 2007 Mich. App. LEXIS 156. The disagreement between defendants’ occupational health expert witness Dr. Michael Goodman was on the causal connection. The court ruled:

The fact that two scientists value the available research differently and ascribe different significance to that research does not necessarily make either of their conclusions unreliable. Indeed, science is, at its heart, itself an ongoing search for truth, with new discoveries occurring daily, and with regular disagreements between even the most respected members of any given field. A Daubert-type hearing of this kind is not a judicial search for truth. The courts are unlikely to be capable of achieving a degree of scientific knowledge that scientists cannot….The inquiry is not into whether an expert’s opinion is necessarily correct or universally accepted. The inquiry is into whether the opinion is rationally derived from a sound foundation.

In the dissent, Judge O’Connell found that plaintiff’s expert witness and defendants’ expert testified that no less than 15 epidemiological studies have been conducted to determine if there is an empirically verifiable correlation between brake grinding and mesothelioma, none of these studies established a causal connection Therefore, under Daubert, Dr. Lemen’s testimony should be inadmissible.