Reliability Is King (or Should Be)!

Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals  Frye v. United States Daubert Daubert People v. Wesley Frye Frye

Just when a scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this twilight zone the evidential force of the principle must be recognized, and while courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well-recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.

Wesley Frye Wesley Frye's Frye

Controversy vs. Consensus

Wesley

The point of noting controversy about the reliability of the forensic technique is not for our Court to determine whether the method was or was not reliable - - - but whether there was consensus in the scientific community as to its reliability. The Frye test emphasizes "counting scientists' votes, rather than on verifying the soundness of a scientific conclusion." Where controversy rages, a court may conclude that no consensus has been reached.

Custody Evaluations: A Cauldron of Controversy

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If a professional psychologist is "evaluating" you in a situation in which you are at risk and asks you for responses to ink blots or to incomplete sentences, or for a drawing of anything, walk out of that psychologist's office. Going through with such an examination creates the danger of having a serious decision made about you on totally invalid grounds.

any existence Frye Frye

A Point of Concordance

personally

A practitioner utilizing a respected text and generating his/her own interpretive statements, can explain the bases for the statements offered and can, if called upon to do so, cite the specific pages on which pertinent information can be found. Companies that derive income from the sale of computer-generated interpretive reports protect their proprietary rights to the decision rules by which the computer programs operate. As a result, no user of an interpretive report is able to identify the data patterns that have triggered the computer to produce a particular descriptive statement.

ethical

A problem in the use of interpretive scoring programs provided by testing services is that the ethical criteria of 9.09(b) may be impossible to meet. Presently, the algorithms (i.e., the program logic and decision rules) used to generate the statements in the computer-generated test interpretations (CGTI) are proprietary secrets and not available for review by the evaluator. Therefore, it is not possible for evaluators to know how to answer important questions about how the program generates the statements found in CGTI's.

Conclusion

Timothy M. Tippins is an adjunct professor at Albany Law School and is on the faculty of the American Academy of Forensic Psychology and on the Affiliate Postdoctoral Forensic Faculty at St. John's University.