8127/frame/fm

 
5.
Admissibility Hearings
Depending on the discipline in which you work, and whether you have used
any methodologies that might be considered “novel scientific evidence,” you
may have to testify in an admissibility hearing before you can present your
results before a jury. In the United States, some states follow the federal 
 
Frye
(
 
Frye v. United States
) standard for admissibility, which can be summarized
as “generally accepted by the relevant scientific community.” Others follow
the statutory 
 
Federal Rules of Evidence
, reincarnated as the 
 
Daubert v. Merrill
Dow Pharmaceuticals
, a standard for admissibility that can be summarized
as “more probative than prejudicial.” Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled that the 
 
Daubert
standard may be applied to any sort of expert testi-
mony, not just strictly “scientific” testimony (
 
Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael
).
Whether or not you are personally involved in an admissibility hearing, you
should be familiar with any case and statutory law pertaining to the admis-
sibility of scientific evidence.
 
6.
Educating the Judge and the Jury
One of the most important functions of the scientist in the courtroom is to
educate the judge and jury so that they can appreciate the import of the
examiner’s conclusions. The witness should neither condescend to the lay
audience, nor obfuscate the information in a flurry of technical terms. Clear,
simple explanations, with the intention of communicating the sense rather
than the explicit details, usually work best. Visual aids and well-crafted anal-
ogies can be enormously helpful in conveying technical information in a
comprehensible way to nonscientists. If you lose the trier of fact, it does not
matter how brilliant your work was, or how convincing your conclusion. If
you cannot communicate it, you might as well not have done it.
The very process of simplifying technical information results in a loss of
accuracy. This is the compromise we make in transporting our conclusions
out of the scientific realm and into the legal arena. The expert witness must
constantly balance the need to convey the information in a technically correct
manner with the necessity to impart the take-home message clearly to a lay
audience. This is precisely where a summary in lay terms is useful. This allows
the expert the latitude to communicate the substance of his conclusion in
easily understandable terms.