Opinion ID: 2271648
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Circuit Court's Decision in This Case

Text: We will now apply the appreciable help to the trier of fact test to the Circuit Court's decision to exclude Dr. Schretlen's expert testimony on eyewitness identification, giving deference to the trial court's exercise of discretion, and taking care to determine whether the court adopted a negative view of such testimony in light of Bloodsworth. We apply this test in the course of considering Bomar's arguments in favor of admission. Bomar claims the proffered expert testimony would have been helpful to the jury because it would inform the jury how (1) a trained observer does not recall an event more accurately than a lay person; (2) confidence is not necessarily correlated with accuracy; (3) a memory tends to fade over time in a curvilinear fashion; (4) stress can adversely affect one's memory; and (5) the manner a photo array is presented to an eyewitness can lead to false identifications. Bomar argues Dr. Schretlen's testimony would have informed jurors, contrary to popular belief[,] that a trained observer does not have a better memory than a layperson. In support of this opinion, Bomar also cites statements from a series of articles. See Schmechel, et al., 46 JURIMETRICS at 200; Timothy P. O'Toole, et al., District of Columbia Public Defender Survey: What Do Jurors Understand About Eyewitness Reliability, THE CHAMPION, April 2005, at 29. But Dr. Schretlen did not rely on any of the articles or studies therein as the basis of his opinion. In fact, the record is devoid of any specific study whose data Dr. Schretlen relied on to form his opinion on this issue. The CSA regarded Dr. Schretlen's testimony as vague and found the motions judge's exclusion of it understandabl[e]. Bomas, 181 Md.App. at 217, 956 A.2d at 223. We agree; the testimony is extremely general, vague, and inconclusive. Further, the witness offered nothing to support his general statements. The Circuit Court was well within the realm of its discretion in excluding this testimony in light of the third prong of Rule 5-702, which calls for a sufficient factual basis to support the expert's testimony. See Buxton v. Buxton, 363 Md. 634, 651, 770 A.2d 152, 162 (2001) (experts' testimony properly admitted when both described the basis for their assumptions and calculations); Young v. State, 388 Md. 99, 119 n. 11, 879 A.2d 44, 56 n. 11 (2005) (Testimony describing the methods employed in examining the DNA samples and calculating the match probabilities can lay the foundation for the trial court to determine that a sufficient factual basis exists for the DNA expert to testify to the source of the DNA evidence.) Bomar next suggests that the court erred in precluding Dr. Schretlen's testimony on the lack of a correlation between a witness's confidence and accuracy. But during his testimony, Dr. Schretlen described conflicting conclusions drawn by studies in this area. He even described scientific research on the relationship between confidence and accuracy as mixed and expanded on this, stating: Some studies show that how confident an eye witness is does predict the accuracy of his or her memory in that more confident eyewitnesses tend to be more accurate. Other studies have shown that there isn't a relationship between the two.... Under some circumstances, confidence is a pretty good predictor. The trial court had discretion to exclude this testimony under Rule 5-702 because it offered nothing of value to the jury. Testimony based on unspecified studies with conflicting conclusions regarding the correlation between confidence and accuracy in identifying persons would offer little to no help to the jury in evaluating Bailey's identification of Bomar. On the effect of time on memory, the motions court was entitled to find that, under these circumstances, Dr. Schretlen's testimony would have been unhelpful to a jury or within the common knowledge of a layperson. The effect of time on memory is something, as the doctor concedes, within the ken of jurors. The curvilinear relationship of the forgetting curve, whereby an individual tends to lose the most information about an event in the first moments post-exposure, which may not be known by jurors, would not have been helpful to the jury here because Bailey and Dower made their identifications six months after the shooting. The date of their identification places their recollections of the shooting in the part of the memory curve that is intuitive to a layperson. Dr. Schretlen's proffered opinion on the effect of stress on memory also would have been confusing to a jury. Dr. Schretlen's testimony insufficiently related to the facts of the case because the lone study he cited involved individuals who had directly experienced the high stress event, whereas Bailey and Dower witnessed the shooting at a distance. The testimony also shed little light on how to quantify the stress levels of the eyewitnesses who are not the subjects of the stress-inducing event. Indeed, according to Dr. Schretlen, individuals experience stress differently. Dr. Schretlen also conceded that low to moderate levels of stress might actually be beneficial to memory. Other than the prisoners of war study, Dr. Schretlen acknowledged that very few studies of stress during violent events have been performed because such studies would not gain academic approval to proceed. For these reasons, the motions court was warranted in determining that Dr. Schretlen's testimony on the effects of stress would not have been helpful to a jury. [15]