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Evidentiary Law is Soaked in Blood
Apr. 23rd, 2006 05:17 pmWith a headline like that, you probably think I'm crazy, but really, it is.
This week in school, I learned that there is no case so gruesome and heart-rending that a sufficiently high court cannot reduce it to an abstract discussion of legal technicalities.
Evidentiary law regarding expert witnesses in this country was initially established in a second-degree murder case (Frye v. United States), which was superseded (an event uniquely devoid of death or debilitation) by Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, as determined by the Supreme Court in a case regarding congenital defects possibly caused by anti-nausea medication in 1993 (Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals). Since the Daubert ruling left something to be desired, the court clarified in General Electric v. Joiner (1997, PCBs and lung cancer), Carmichael v. Kumho Tire (1998, tire blowout causes fatal car accident), and Weisgram v. Marley (2000, death by fire and carbon monoxide poisoning).
I haven't been able to find any information on the eventual resolution of any of these cases. No word on the settlement for the birth defects, or whether or not Frye was eventually found guilty, or what happened in sentencing. Neither Google nor Wikipedia has anything revealing.
The Frye standard is that expert testimony has to be generally accepted by the scientific community in order to be admissible. I am unable to find any record of whether trial judges receive notes declaring that Andrew Wiles is a poophead and that the scientific community as a whole is more concerned with academic tenure than with recognition of The Truth as revealed to people with severe cranial trauma, nor is there any publicly available information concerning what kind of drinking secretaries to trial judges do, or how hard they pound their heads against their desks when dealing with that correspondence, but there's got to be blood there too.
This week in school, I learned that there is no case so gruesome and heart-rending that a sufficiently high court cannot reduce it to an abstract discussion of legal technicalities.
Evidentiary law regarding expert witnesses in this country was initially established in a second-degree murder case (Frye v. United States), which was superseded (an event uniquely devoid of death or debilitation) by Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, as determined by the Supreme Court in a case regarding congenital defects possibly caused by anti-nausea medication in 1993 (Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals). Since the Daubert ruling left something to be desired, the court clarified in General Electric v. Joiner (1997, PCBs and lung cancer), Carmichael v. Kumho Tire (1998, tire blowout causes fatal car accident), and Weisgram v. Marley (2000, death by fire and carbon monoxide poisoning).
I haven't been able to find any information on the eventual resolution of any of these cases. No word on the settlement for the birth defects, or whether or not Frye was eventually found guilty, or what happened in sentencing. Neither Google nor Wikipedia has anything revealing.
The Frye standard is that expert testimony has to be generally accepted by the scientific community in order to be admissible. I am unable to find any record of whether trial judges receive notes declaring that Andrew Wiles is a poophead and that the scientific community as a whole is more concerned with academic tenure than with recognition of The Truth as revealed to people with severe cranial trauma, nor is there any publicly available information concerning what kind of drinking secretaries to trial judges do, or how hard they pound their heads against their desks when dealing with that correspondence, but there's got to be blood there too.
