Concurrent Expert Testimony as a Potential Remedy for Expert Witness Partisanship

Cuny John Jay College Of Criminal Justice, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

When evidence is technical or difficult to understand, experts may provide testimony that assists jurors in evaluating the evidence. However, experts may become biased toward the side that has hired them and attorneys may seek experts who will deliberately bias their testimony or may make experts seem untrustworthy through cross-examination. Concurrent testimony is a practice that is presumed to remedy expert partisanship: experts for both sides in a case meet to discuss the case and generate a joint report, they testify together during trial, and are cross-examined by one another and the attorney for the opposing side. Relying on theories of attitude-behavior relationships and persuasion, the PI proposes three studies to examine the effects of this concurrent testimony technique on the behavior of experts, jurors, and attorneys. In the first study, experts will generate forensic reports and testify under adversarial or concurrent procedures. The experts' products will be coded for indications of extremity and bias. In the second study, community members will act as mock jurors in a trial simulation containing adversarial or concurrent expert testimony to examine whether concurrent expert testimony reduces jurors' reliance on heuristic cues (e.g., source credibility) and increases sensitivity to variation in the strength of the evidence supporting a particular verdict. In a third study, the PI will investigate whether attorneys select different (perhaps less impartial) experts or change their examination strategies when using concurrent rather than adversarial expert procedures. The results of these studies will provide valuable information about effectiveness of the concurrent expert remedy for expert partisanship and elucidate the psychological mechanisms underlying the reduction in expert bias and the improvement of fact-finder decision making when this remedy is implemented. These studies will evaluate the effectiveness of a remedy for expert partisanship and provide evidence on which future policy decisions could be made.