Expert Witness Blog

Organized crime expert witness and former FBI agent James Wagner will be allowed to testify at the trial of several alleged mob figures accused of taking part in a conspiracy that included 18 murders. U.S. District Judge James Zagel said expert witness Wagner can discuss how the so-called Chicago Outfit is structured and how it operates, although he can't talk about individual members or the defendants.

Defense attorneys do not want Wagner, head of the Chicago Crime Commission and former head of the FBI's organized crime unit in Chicago, to link their clients to the mob. The trial is expected to start in June and is aimed at clearing up unsolved gangland slayings, reports the The Journal Gazette - Times Courier.

Tim Storey of the National Conference of State Legislatures will be the lead expert witness at the California Assembly Elections Committee hearings on redistricting. The NCSL is a bipartisan group representing all 50 state legislatures. Storey, an expert witness on redistricting, is a senior fellow with NCSL and has authored many articles on the redistricting and elections processes.

So far this year more than 25 states have considered proposals, but so far none has passed one. In the last two year period preceding this year, 23 states looked at proposals according to the California Progress Report.

Justice T. David Little of the Ontario Superior Court spoke at the Advocates’ Society 2007 Spring Symposium in Toronto regarding expert witnesses. Justice Little said that expert witnesses are there to assist the court with issues that it may not understand. “Tell the expert before they get on the stand, ‘Don’t be an advocate.” In Ontario counsel have to seek leave from the trial judge if they wish to call more than three expert witnesses.

Also speaking at the symposium was Joan Lukey, a partner with WilmerHale in Boston. Ms. Halle spoke on holographic evidence. The technology has been used in one trial so far in the United States in a case that questioned a surgeon’s actions during a medical procedure. A holographic model of the operating room was created as evidence, which resembled the actual scene from the day in question, complete with the appearance of virtual figures in the room, as reported in LawTimes.com.

Yorkville, IL residents called their own expert witnesses to fight landfill developer Fox Moraine LLC's plan for a landfill on the city's southwest side. Fox Moraine argued that properties near the facility would suffer no serious harm. After hearings, Yorkwille aldermen voted 7 to 1 against the plan. Aldermen Golinski described Fox Moraine's landfill expert witness as "unconvincing."

Many of the city officials have questioned Fox Moraine's safety measures, its traffic plan and its compliance with Kendall County rules, which ban landfills within city limits says the BeaconNews Online.

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.

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.

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."

James Earl Edmiston, who fraudulently testified he was a computer expert witness, has recently pleaded guilty to federal perjury charges. Federal agents arrested Edmiston in September, 2006 after they became suspicious of the qualifications listed on his curriculum vitae. For example, Edmiston had featured degrees from the California Institute of Technology and the UCLA. It was revealed that these schools didn't offer the degrees Edmiston had listed.

According to California's Fresno Bee, Edmiston's downfall came after he was retained by Fresno attorneys to work on two child pornography cases. Local U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents involved in the cases noticed some inaccuracies on his résumé, and further checks found alleged multiple false statements. It was also revealed that Edmiston served time in prison for forgery.

Edmiston could receive up to 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine when he is sentenced July 13 by U.S. District Judge Lawrence O'Neill.

It is not clear sure how many cases Edmiston worked on as an expert witness, or what will be the fate of those cases.

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.

The U.S. Court of Appeals, 10th Circuit, affirms lower court ruling on expert witness testimony. In Mariposa Farms, LLC. v. Westfailia-Surge, Inc., 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 473, Westfalia unsuccessfullly tried to discredit farm equipment expert witness testimony. The higher court found that Dr. Sybren Reitsma's and Dr. Corbett's testimony provided the jury with sufficient evidence to find that Westfalia was negligent and breached its warranties.

Mariposa Farms, Inc. filed suit in July 2003 against Westfalia alleging negligence and breach of warranty resulting from the installation and operation of cow-milking equipment manufactured by Westfalia. Mariposa alleged that the equipment malfunction created unstable vacuum pressure, which eventually caused mastitis to spread throughout its herd. At trial, Mariposa expert witness Dr. Sybren Reitsma testified that, based on photographs and conversations with Mariposa's principal manager Larry Skelley, it was his expert opinion that the design and installation of Westfalia's vacuum system caused the unstable vacuum pressure which led to the mastitis outbreak. Another Mariposa expert witness, Dr. Robert Corbett, opined that the milking machine equipment malfunction caused the mastitis spread because, in his experience, the bacteria could not spread as rapidly as it did without the presence of a milking machine malfunction

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.

Marie Lindor has retained a well known expert witness in her Brooklyn federal court case, UMG v. Lindor. RIAA alleges copyright infringement due to shared files on Lindor's home computer. Professor Johan Pouwelse, P2P technology expert, will testify regarding file sharing networks.

Prof. Johan Pouwelse, Chairman of the Parallel and Distributed Systems Group of Delft University of Technology, testified against RIAA's MediaSentry 'investigations' (PDF) in a case in the Netherlands. His expert witness testimony resulted in the court directing ISPs in the Netherlands not to turn over their subscribers' information. Lindor hopes to discredit RIAA's software expert witness, Dr. Doug Jacobson, writes the New York Country Lawyer.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee heard expert witness testimony in an attempt to find causes behind record-high gasoline prices. Oil and gas expert witnesses described years of a lack of investment in refinery capacity as a primary factor in rising prices.

Deutsche Bank's Paul Sankey, oil and gas production expert witness, said years of oil companies losing money led to many companies neglecting refinery investment. A contributing factor was the Texas City explosion, which caused other refiners to operate more cautiously and with less capacity. As the Associated Press reports, last year also saw the temporary shutdown of production at Prudhoe Bay due to maintenance problems.

A Des Moines mother alleges that her young daughter was being sexually abused by the child's father. Pictures led the mother's expert witness to conclude with 99.9 percent certainty that there had been abuse.

As reported in the DesMoines Register, the mother called the child-abuse hot line and began taking the child for weekly therapy sessions. The state's child-abuse specialist examined the child and found no signs of sexual abuse, though child sexual abuse experts say lascivious acts don't necessarily leave physical evidence.

Expert witnesses will be questioned by a three-member arbitration panel in the Floyd Landis hearing to determine if the cyclist used banned synthetic testosterone during the Tour de France. Performance Enhancing Drug Experts will answer questions from arbitrators and the opposing party. Cycling Experts are also expected to testfiy.

Landis could be banned for two years from cycling competitions and stripped of his title, something that's never happened in the Tour's 104-year history. CBS2.com expects that Landis' lawyers to argue that major mistakes were made in the tests that came up positive for synthetic testosterone.

Naples gastroenterologist Dr. Michael Marks is named in a medical malpractice wrongful death suit involving Judith Dill’s death on April 25, 2003. Expert witness Dr. Ciaran P. Kelly testified that Judith Dill’s condition was caused by a post-operative ileus, which acts like a blockage because it prevents passage of intestinal contents. Gastroenterologist expert Dr. Kelly said Marks should never have ordered a bowel preparation, magnesium citrate, because Judith Dill hadn’t eaten in eight days.

Naples Daily News reports that Dr. Marks performed an endoscopy on April 9 and on April 12, the colonoscopy. During the colonoscopy, Dill vomited violently, aspirating her vomit, which went into her lungs, later causing infection and death on April 25, 2003.

Peter Braunstein admits to his attack on a a former colleague at Fairchild Publications in October of 2005 but has pleaded not guilty, blaming his actions on undiagnosed schizophrenia. Dr. Monte Buchsbaum, expert witness and professor of psychiatry at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, said that images of the activity in Braunstein's brain were consistent with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

As reported at CourtTVnew.com, the alleged deficiency is crucial to the success of Braunstein's defense strategy, which requires that a jury find he was incapable of conscious decision-making the day of the attack. Braunstein's lawyers are expected to call another schizophrenia expert witness to corroborate Buchsbaum's claim by making a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia.