When one looks at the characteristics of attorneys, it becomes obvious that they do not spend a great deal of time finding the “best” expert witness: 1. Attorneys are middle persons who are controlled by the client. They will advocate the expert witness to the client, who ultimately pays for…
Viewing jail visitor lists is a common practice among prosecuting attorneys. But what happens when defense counsel asks an expert witness to visit a prisoner? Should that information be privileged? Courts have disagreed. In California, one court denied the public defenders’ request to keep prosecutors from knowing which defense experts…
Philip Michels, a plaintiff’s lawyer at Michels & Watkins in Westwood, California, has written an excellent article entitled “Finding and effectively using experts in a professional medical negligence case.” The article appears in the April 2007 of the Advocate magazine, published by the Counsumer Attorneys Associations for Southern California. In…
U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed struck down a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for operators of Internet sites to let anyone under 17 have access to sexual material, rebuffing the government’s argument that software filters are ineffective and upholding earlier rulings that the law infringed on free-speech…
West Virginia’s “Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse” plans to ask the legislature to create a “code of ethics” to prevent “misleading expert witness testimony.” As reported in the West Virginia Register-Herald, a survey about expert witnesses was conducted by the the Center for Survey Research at the University of Virginia: In…
Several medical expert witnesses and psychology experts are again expected to testify in the retrial of Daniel Ramsey of Keokuk, Iowa. His retrial began on Monday, April 2, 2007 in Lewistown, Iowa for the July 8, 1996, slayings of two girls. Ramsey was 18 when he was accused of the…
Given the extreme importance of expert testimony to litigation, is the reliability test for expert testimony set out in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals the most radical and consequential change in the modern law of evidence? Before Daubert, most courts in most circumstances required only that an expert witness be…
Former Lt. Gov. Earle E. Morris Jr.’s appeal of his securities-fraud conviction has been bumped up to the South Carolina Supreme Court. Morris, 78, was former board chairman of Carolina Investors. In November 2004, he was convicted on 23 counts of lying to investors during the Upstate firm’s financial collapse.…
As reported in Pennsylvania’s Times Leader, U.S. District Judge James Munley allowed gang expert witness Jared Lewis to testify as an expert witness at a Pennsylvania trial regarding the Illegal Immigration Relief Act. Lewis testified that the gang named “MS-13” had a presence in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and was one of…
A preliminary understanding and some basic investigation of the topic of expertise will allow the researcher to know what questions to ask the potential expert witness, and may also lead to the names of good potential experts in that field. Library web sites are an excellent place to begin the…