Navigating Expert Reliability: Are Criminal Standards of Certainty Being Left on the Dock?

This article shows that, as to proffers of asserted expert testimony, civil defendants win their Daubert reliability challenges to plaintiffs’ proffers most of the time, and that criminal defendants virtually always lose their reliability challenges to government proffers. And, when civil defendants’ proffers are challenged by plaintiffs, those defendants usually win, but when criminal defendants’ proffers are challenged by the prosecution, the criminal defendants usually lose. The article then goes on to examine, in detail, various categories of expert proffers in criminal cases, including “syndrome evidence,” polygraph, bite mark, handwriting, modus operandi, and eyewitness weakness, to shed light on whether the system bias revealed in the statistical breakdown is illusory or real. Finally, an afterword analyzes the last year’s cases, and makes observations on apparent trends.