Opinion ID: 1485096
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Lanning's Qualifications

Text: To be qualified as an expert, a witness must have sufficient skill, knowledge, or experience in the relevant field so that his testimony will probably aid the trier in his search for truth. [24] Appellant claims that Lanning's testimony about compliant child victims was an exercise in child psychology for which Lanning lacked the requisite qualifications because he was not trained as a psychologist or psychiatrist and had not interviewed victims of child sex abuse. [25] The trial judge, concluding that Lanning was qualified on the basis of his extensive experience in the field of child sexual victimization, ruled that appellant's objections went to the weight to be given Lanning's testimony but not its admissibility. We are not persuaded that the judge's acceptance of Lanning's qualifications was manifestly erroneous. Expertise may be predicated on experience rather than academic training. Scholarship is not a prerequisite for eligibility to testify as an expert witness; the relevant knowledge may be derived from professional experience, including, in particular, experience as a police officer. [26] To be sure, experience is a slippery concept. There has to be a fit between the witness's experiential qualifications and the testimony to be offered; [a] witness may be qualified as an expert on certain matters and not others. [27] Accordingly, where a proffered expert's qualifications are based primarily on experience, the witness should be able to explain how that experience leads to the conclusion reached, why that experience is a sufficient basis for the opinion, and how that experience is reliably applied to the facts, so that the judge may evaluate whether the witness truly is qualified to render an opinion on the matter in question. [28] In this case, while Lanning apparently lacked formal academic training in psychology, [29] he spent over twenty years in the Behavioral Science Unit studying the sexual victimization of children. He had shared his conclusions with, and undoubtedly had received feedback from, other professionals working in the same or related areas, including mental health specialists. There is no question Lanning was qualified to describe the behavior patterns he had observed in hundreds of cases, and his psychological testimony was grounded in those observations and correspondingly modest in scope. In advancing the general reasons child victims cooperated in their abuse and were reluctant to report it, Lanning did not purport to offer a psychiatric diagnosis or profile or a sophisticated description of a child victim's mental processes. The judge was presented with no evidence that Lanning's methods or his opinions about victim psychology were controversial or suspect. And as the judge noted, Lanning had been qualified to testify as an expert on child molesters and their victims in a large number of other jurisdictions. [30] Given Lanning's experience, his extensive study and the limited nature of his psychological testimony, the judge did not abuse her discretion in finding that he had acquired sufficient knowledge to be qualified to address the subjects he did.