Of course, all this is subject to change, but was fairly accurate as of 1999, and I continue to get emails from people updating my information. Daubert may provide the impetus to amend Fed. General acceptance is an austere standard absent from and incompatible with the Rules of Evidence. The Daubert ruling substitutes a reliability test for a relevancy test. For states that follow neither Frye nor Daubert , this means that the continued practice of using reliability as a weight once relevancy has been established exposes a serious constitutional liability.
All trial courts make a preliminary determination of admissibility.
This job involves a preliminary assessment of whether the evidence is relevant, competent, and material. This ensures that flaws in the methodology would have been detected and that the technique is finding its way into use via the literature. Every scientific idea has Type I and Type II error rates, and these can be estimated with a fair amount of precision. This is just the Marx standard, which is assumed to be incorporated in Daubert as it was with Frye . DNA evidence is admissible under either the Frye or Daubert standard, but the reliability issue goes beyond the matter of testimony to the proper performance of protocols and probability estimates.