Court Opinion

ID: 9759778
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 00:27:40.1482+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:04.547260
License: Public Domain

DAUPHINOT, Justice,
concurring.
I concur with the result reached in this thoughtful and carefully reasoned opinion. I write from a concern for the collateral consequences of rigidly applying the three-pronged Kelly test to all eases in which scientific expert testimony is proffered.
Kelly dealt with the admissibility of DNA testing results. Kelly, then, involves what, for want of a better term, I call “hard science.” As the Court of Criminal Appeals has pointed out in Jordan, DNA test results are not reliable if the base theory is flawed or the testing was not performed correctly.6
I do not read the Kelly test as the exclusive test to be applied in all cases in which a judge is called upon to determine the reliability of expert scientific testimony. The behavioral sciences often play an important part in trial testimony. A small child may exhibit some physical signs of sexual abuse, but those signs are not unequivocal. When, however, the physical manifestations are combined with behavioral manifestations, the combination may lead a trier of fact to an unequivocal conviction that the child. has *179been the victim of sexual abuse. Expert scientific testimony regarding behavioral clues is often offered in such a case. Such evidence from the behavioral sciences may be necessary to help the trier of fact understand the significance of the child’s behavior. But this testimony, as well as testimony on subjects such as domestic violence, battered-spouse syndrome, and sexual assaults, is not amenable to the Kelly test.
Instead of requiring that an inflexible three-pronged test be applied whenever expert scientific evidence is offered, even though no testing or its equivalent has been performed, I understand Jordan to require a flexible approach. As the court points out, the trial court’s duty is to weed out junk science and to assure the reliability of the proffered theory.7 Indeed, the Court of Criminal Appeals has identified a list of nonexclusive factors which the trial court should consider in determining reliability.8
As the majority has pointed out, the factors will differ depending upon the facts of the ease. This flexible approach, as opposed to an arbitrary test, will allow parties to provide the trier of fact with necessary tools for interpreting the evidence, whether the testimony involves behavioral or hard science.

. Jordan v. State, 928 S.W.2d 550, 555 (Tex.Crim.App.1996).

. Id.

. To the extent that a trial court applies these factors rigidly, though, the same untenable results that occur from mechanically applying Kelly would also occur, as Justice Comyn pointed out:
Unlike some other scientific theories, theories or opinions about behavior, memory, and psychology depend largely on the subjective interpretation of the expert and usually do not have demonstrable rates of error. Scholars have observed that “the nature of certain social and behavioral science theories may be inherently inconsistent with Daubert criteria such as 'falsifiability’ and 'error rates’ ” and that some new theories “have simply not been sufficiently developed as theories to allow for proper consideration of the guidelines offered by Daubert."
S.V. v. R.V., 933 S.W.2d 1, 26 (Tex.1996) (Cor-nyn, J., concurring) (quoting Richardson et al., The Problems of Applying Daubert to Psychological Syndrome Evidence, 79 Judicature 10, 11-12 (1995)).