Concurrent Expert Testimony as a Potential Remedy for Expert Witness Partisanship

专家证人同时作证作为专家证人党派之争的潜在补救措施

• 批准号: 1023796
• 负责人: Margaret Bull Kovera
• 金额: $ 25万
• 依托单位: CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2013-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1023796&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Concurrent; Expert; Testimony; Potential; Remedy

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.

当证据具有技术性或难以理解时，专家可以提供证词来协助陪审员评估证据。然而，专家可能会对雇用他们的一方产生偏见，律师可能会寻求故意偏见他们的证词的专家，或者可能通过交叉询问使专家显得不值得信任。同步作证是一种被认为可以纠正专家党派偏见的做法：案件双方的专家开会讨论案件并生成一份联合报告，他们在审判期间一起作证，并接受彼此和案件律师的交叉询问。依靠态度-行为关系和说服理论，PI 提出了三项研究来检验这种同时作证技术对专家、陪审员和律师行为的影响。在第一项研究中，专家将生成法医报告并在对抗性或并行程序下作证。专家的产品将针对极端和偏见的迹象进行编码。在第二项研究中，社区成员将在包含对抗性或并发专家证词的审判模拟中充当模拟陪审员，以检查并发专家证词是否会减少陪审员对启发式线索（例如来源可信度）的依赖并增加对证据强度变化的敏感性。支持特定判决的证据。在第三项研究中，PI将调查律师在使用并行而非对抗性专家程序时是否选择不同（可能不太公正）的专家或改变他们的审查策略。这些研究的结果将为关于并行专家补救措施的有效性提供有价值的信息。专家党派之争，并阐明在实施这种补救措施时减少专家偏见和改善事实认定者决策的心理机制。这些研究将评估专家党派之争补救措施的有效性，并为未来的政策决策提供证据。