Source: https://cyber.harvard.edu/daubert/ma.htm
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 00:42:35+00:00

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What is the trial judge's role in overseeing the testimony of expert witnesses? Unlike lay witnesses, whose testimony a jury can evaluate with common sense and experience, expert witnesses offer conclusions based on practices and knowledge beyond the ken of the average juror. As a consequence, testimony by unpoliced expert witnesses can have a potentially prejudicial effect on jurors, who may be inclined to believe the experts based solely on their status as such. How is the trial judge to know whether the expert is merely speculating, or whether the evidence on which the expert bases his or her testimony is sufficient to support the conclusion? Judges certainly prevent lay witnesses from speculating, and are expected to exclude a witness offering wholly speculative testimony. Why should the situation differ when the witness purports to be an "expert?"
If one accepts the proposition that the trial judge has a duty to exclude unreliable experts, a host of concerns inevitably follow. How is a trial judge to assess the scientific or technical adequacy of expert testimony if even a cursory understanding of the issues requires specialized training? Can anyone without such training fully understand the issues and come to a rational conclusion as to their validity? To what degree can the trial judge rely on the expert's own assertions about his or her qualifications? All of these concerns carry heavy weight. For in most cases the trial judge is hardly a more qualified assessor of scientific credibility than the jury itself.
Suddenly, the Federal judge could no longer rely on the scientific community for a determination of an expert's credibility. Instead, judges are to make the determination on their own. Federal trial judges were forced to decide for themselves whether an expert's methodology -- the often highly complicated basis for the conclusions -- was reliable.
Although the Daubert case itself deals only with trials conducted under the Federal Rules of Evidence, most states have chosen to adopt its test in one form or another. Massachusetts, for example, adopted a variant of the Daubert test in Commonwealth v. Lanigan.(10) While few state trial judges will ever hear a "mass toxic tort" case such as Daubert, this does not diminish the need to understand the Daubert rulings. Much like the evidence offered, the judicial mechanisms for dealing with a Daubert challenge are still in the frontier stage. Attorneys will develop new means of both offering and challenging expert testimony, and the trial judge must be prepared to deal with them.
It is the intent of this paper and those that follow to explore the many questions surrounding the judge's gatekeeping role. Acting as a roadmap for the expansive gatekeeping terrain, the remainder of this introduction outlines the history of judicial gatekeeping in Massachusetts, and a synopsis of the more detailed discussions to follow.
The Court specifically adopted Daubert, and held that a proponent of scientific evidence was allowed to demonstrate the reliability or validity on an underlying theory or process despite a lack of "general acceptance."(33) In adopting the Daubert test, however, the court noted that "we suspect that general acceptance in the relevant scientific community will continue to be the significant, and often the only, issue."(34) Nevertheless, the court held that the ceiling principle was sufficiently reliable, despite the dispute over its accuracy among scientists.
Should evidence from "field sobriety tests" be subjected to the rigors of Daubert? Should a medical doctor's clinical diagnosis be withheld from a jury because it is novel and is not yet verifiable to a degree of certainty, or should another doctor's opinion simply attack it's credibility? These are a just a few of the issues surrounding the Daubert dilemma.
As Massachusetts Courts struggle with Lanigan and Daubert, the U.S. Supreme Court will attempt to clarify the "gatekeeping" role when it hears Joiner v. General Electric next term. While the Joiner case deals only with a standard-of-review question, it seems likely that the court will use this opportunity to clarify the issues left open in Daubert. A firm grasp of the substantive issues surrounding expert testimony is even more important now that the Supreme Court is set to re-examine its elusive "gatekeeping" decision.
Will Massachusetts adopt Joiner part-in-parcel, or will the SJC instead retain the Lanigan framework? Will the SJC even accept the Joiner determination as to the proper standard for appellate review of Daubert hearings? Currently, Massachusetts utilizes an abuse of discretion standard for evidentiary rulings. If the Supreme Court formulates a de novo rule, will the SJC follow suit? What about the other holdings of Daubert and its progeny? A trial judge versed in all of the Daubert issues will be well-prepared to deal with the bar's reaction to Joiner and the changes that will surely follow.
It is with this purpose in mind that we turn to the substantive issues. What remains is a list of the major concerns surrounding Daubert. In the papers that follow, each of these issues is examined in detail, as is its importance to the trial judge in Massachusetts.
1. How has the role of judicial gatekeeping evolved in the United States. How has the balance of power between judge and jury shifted in reaction to trends in American history? Should this have any bearing on how the gatekeeping role is formulated today?
2. What is the influence of summary judgement on the development of judicial gatekeeping? Gatekeeping clearly is rooted in the traditional division of responsibilities between judge and jury and on the distinction between fact and law. One way to view Daubert gatekeeping is as another means by which the judge may assert his role as arbiter of questions of law. The gatekeeping role, then, echoes the decisions a judge makes when ruling on a motion for summary judgement.
3. What is the precise issue to be determined in a Daubert hearing? Different courts interpret the meaning and scope of "methodology" in different ways. Does methodology describe an expert's general approach, or does it include all the steps underlying that expert's conclusion? Once reliability is established, how much weight is to be given to the evidence for purposes of determining "fit?" Is a judge permitted to conclude that the testimony is so weak that it lacks relevance in any meaningful sense of the word?
4. Is Daubert a liberalizing or constraining change from Frye? When the Supreme Court first decided the case, some immediately viewed the decision as a liberalizing departure from the "general acceptance" test. At the same time, however, post-Daubert trial courts are now equipped with a host of criteria on which they can potentially exclude "questionable" scientific testimony. Has the "liberalizing decision" been transformed into a more restrictive test?
5. Does Daubert apply to areas other than new science? Is science merely a special case or does Daubert-type gatekeeping also apply to experts in such fields as economics and psychiatry? If so, might the judge's evaluation of social science methodology differ from that of a "hard" science like biology or chemistry?
6. What is the relationship between legal and scientific standards of proof? How much weight should judges lend to statistical measures of scientific proof? More specifically, how important are "significance levels" and "confidence intervals" in determining the reliability of a certain study? Nowhere is the uneasy interface between science and legal evidence more apparent.
7. In toxic tort cases such as Daubert, the plaintiffs all attempted to establish causation through the use of epidemiological studies, which endeavor to measure a statistical relationship between exposure to an agent and the incidence of a harmful condition. Are such studies necessary to prove causation? Are they helpful? Similarly, how should a judge evaluate a physician's testimony based on differential ("clinical") diagnosis?
9. Can Daubert hearings be judicially noticed or otherwise be given precedential value? What effect has Daubert had on pre-existing precedents? Should one judge's assessment of certain scientific evidence preclude a different opinion by other judges, or can the issue of adequacy of an expert's testimony be repeatedly litigated? How much should judges worry about conflicting court decisions on the validity of certain types of methodology?
11. Should differing standards of stringency apply in determining admissibility depending upon the type of case, evidence, or witness before the court? For example, should different standards be applied in civil and criminal cases?
12. How should judges treat the testimony of professional witnesses? On the issue of admissibility of the expert's opinion, should it matter that the witness primarily makes a living from testifying? What if the expert always testifies for one side?
3. "If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise."
4. See generally, Commonwealth v. Lanigan, 419 Mass. 15, 25, Commonwealth v. Curnin, 409 Mass. 218, 223 n. 8, 565 N.E.2d 440 (1991).
5. 509 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786 (1993).
10. (hereinafter "Lanigan II," 419 Mass. 15, 641 N.E.2d 1342 (1994).
11. 346 Mass. 266, 269, 191 N.E.2d 479 (1963).
12. See Commonwealth v. Curnin, 409 Mass. 218, 223 (1991).
13. Geiger, Rocklin, and Sowle, The Judicial Gatekeeper: Should Massachusetts Apply Daubert to Screen Expert Testimony?, 79 Mass. L. Rev. 94 (September, 1994).
14. Lanigan II, supra., at 24.
16. Commonwealth v. Lanigan, 413 Mass. 154, 596 N.E.2d 311 (1991) ("Lanigan I").
18. Lanigan II, 419 Mass. at 16.
19. Commonwealth v. Curnin, 409 Mass. 218, 222 n. 7, 565 N.E.2d 440 (1991).
20. Id. at 225 n. 11.
21. Lanigan II, supra, 419 Mass. at 22.
24. The "ceiling principle" was recommended in a 1992 report by a committee of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled "DNA Technology in Forensic Science. Lanigan II, supra 419 Mass. at 21.
27. Lanigan I, at 163. (In this case, the product rule suggested that the probability of another person exhibiting the same "DNA" profile as Lanigan was one in 2,000,000, while the ceiling principle estimation was on the order of 108,000 to one). Lanigan II, at 27.
35. 113 S.Ct at 2796.
36. 424 Mass. 184, 188, 675 N.E.2d 370 (1997).
37. Rotman v. National Railroad Passenger Corporation, 41 Mass.App.Ct. 317, 319, 669 N.E.2d 1090 (1996).

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