What's wrong with expert tesitmony and did expert testimony convict an innocent woman of murder?
Austin, TX- In August 2005, Rosa Jimenez was charged and tried for murder and serious bodily injury to a child.
The prosecution's evidence photos included an image of a slight cut on Rosa Jimenez's right thumb. According to prosecutors, the cause of Bryan's death was clear. Rosa Jimenez had – for reasons unknown – taken five attached sheets of paper towel, wadded them up tightly, and jammed them down Bryan's throat, depriving him of air. She then waited – while he choked and turned blue and began to die – before taking him to Vera's apartment and calling 911, giving herself a chance to clean up the traces of her crime. She washed blood from the side of her bathtub, and possibly even removed and hid the sheets from her bed. Yet police did not find bloody bed sheets in the apartment, and although there was a drop of Bryan's blood on the tub, there was no evidence to suggest that there had been more blood there, nor were there any signs that someone had tried to clean additional blood stains.
But who, exactly, is in the best position to say what happened to Bryan Gutierrez that day – beyond a reasonable doubt? The only adult present in the apartment, Jimenez, insists that Bryan's choking was an accident. Although Jimenez did not testify at trial, the video of her interview with police was played for the jurors, who could follow along with a printed transcript. In the end, it seems the jurors believed the experts; after a six-day trial the jury found Jimenez guilty, sentencing her to 99 years in prison.
Did the experts in this case – the doctors who forcefully asserted that this had been no accident – help put a cold-blooded child-killer behind bars? Or did the state's use of expert witnesses to explain the fatal injury convince a jury to convict an innocent person? More broadly, in such an expert-dependent case as this – one that demands professional certainty on difficult questions – what is the effect of expert witnesses? Who is the best expert? Who decides? What if they're wrong? And what impact does the use of expert witnesses have on our criminal justice system?
Five years after her trial, after hearings over several days in December 2010, then-Travis County District Judge Charlie Baird concluded that Jimenez is entitled to a new trial. Her new defense attorneys proffered additional expert testimony to counter the expert evidence offered by the state at trial, testimony that Baird found credible. Had Jimenez's jury heard any alternate theory of the crime, it is unlikely that the verdict would have been the same, Baird opined, concluding that Jimenez had been denied due process and that her attorney, veteran defender Leonard Martinez, had rendered ineffective assistance to his client. If the Court of Criminal Appeals agrees, Jimenez's case may be coming back for a retrial.
Professor D. Michael Risinger says there's no doubt that jurors are influenced by expert witnesses: "These people come into court blessed by the judge. They look authoritative, speak authoritatively, and they have paper credentials." But that doesn't necessarily mean that they know what they're talking about. A related problem, of course, is that the system is generally underfunded, says Gross, and without a healthy balance between state and defense, the entire adversarial system can be undermined. In this system, the state usually has access to numerous experts, including many, like medical examiners, who are institutional players. With "limited funds, or none, and no access to experts" to counter the state power, the adversarial process fails. "So whatever adversarial system [there is], if there is only one side to it, it falls apart entirely."
Gross says he can't say specifically that medical experts are unduly influential on jurors, but he suspects they do wield power. "What I can say is that a good expert – that is, an expert who is an effective witness – can be very influential," he said. "When we're in the situation where you're looking for a physician to give advice and get treatment, if you find someone who strikes you as caring and intelligent and reasonable, you breathe a sigh of relief," he posits. "If you have a doctor who creates that impression for a jury – answers questions you'd like a doctor to be able to answer – [and] he's the kind of person you say, 'I'm glad he's treating me,' how could a jury not be influenced by this in the context" of being a witness in a criminal trial? The problem, he says, is that, at times, "some people [who] create that kind of impression are better performers than doctors or scientists."
The best example of that kind of expertise is that of deceased forensic psychiatrist Dr. James Grigson, known as "Dr. Death" for his hundreds of appearances as an expert witness for the state in death penalty cases. Grigson was reprimanded multiple times by professional organizations for allegedly unethical practices, in part for testifying about the future dangerousness of defendants, some of whom he'd never even examined. After he was expelled in 1995 from the American Psychiatric Association and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians for alleged ethical violations, Grigson told The Dallas Morning News that he didn't expect the censures would affect his testifying as an expert for the state. "For them to say I'm unethical ... it's really an insult," he told the daily. Gross says Grigson was exactly the kind of expert that put on a good show for jurors. "He was very manipulative; he wanted to persuade people. You think of him as 'Dr. Death,' but he didn't come across as bloodthirsty" when testifying, he said. "But the problem is that he was testifying to things he had no way of knowing."
Link:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2011-02-04/a-parliament-of-experts/