DAUBERT’S STANDARD
The Daubert standard is set by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in 1993 as legal precedent in the admissibility of expert witnesses’ testimony during legal proceedings of cases. This is a standard that is the basis for the admissibility of evidence in court trials in the US. There are two suggested test for Daubert’ standard of admissibility.
The first one refers to the relevance and the second one refers to reliability. In looking at the relevance of a testimony, an expert’s opinion must fit and coincide with the facts of the case. The expertise of the witness must fit to the situations governing the case. For example, one cannot invite finger print expert if there is no such evidence included in the trial. In terms of reliability, an expert’s testimony will become reliable if his testimony and conclusion went through the scientific method.
Questions as follows must be looked into in order for an expert’s testimony to be considered reliable: “Has the scientific theory or technique been empirically tested; Has the scientific theory or technique been subjected to peer review and publication; What is the known or potential error rate; What is the expert’s qualifications and stature in the scientific community; Can the technique and its results be explained with sufficient clarity and simplicity so that the jury and the court can understand its plain meaning?”
THE CASE
”At approximately 12:25 p.m. on June 13, 2001, a lone male, wearing a mask and surgical gloves, and carrying a handgun, entered the Central Carolina Bank in Durham, North Carolina. He approached Joan Adams, a teller, threw a bag on the counter, and instructed her to “fill up the god*mned f* * *ing bag.” Adams promptly gave the gunman the sum of $7,854 in cash, which included bait bills and an electronic tracking device. Then, a horn sounded twice from the parking lot outside, and the robber left the bank and made his getaway in a purple Ford Probe automobile.
Shortly thereafter, Durham police officer Michael Britton heard radio traffic stating that a purple Ford Probe was involved in a bank robbery. Driving on Faison Road, he observed a purple Ford Probe parked on the wrong side of the street. Officer Britton immediately secured the vehicle, and he later learned that it had been stolen the previous day.
The next day, June 14, 2001, the authorities received a call on its Crimestoppers telephone line from an individual who claimed to have information about the robbery of the Central Carolina Bank. The caller provided detailed information, and later that day the police met the caller, Michael Mitchell, at a local restaurant. Mitchell informed the officers that Patrick Crisp and Lamont Torain had robbed the bank. He further attested that Crisp and Torain had attempted to recruit him to participate in the robbery, but that he had declined. Mitchell explained that Crisp had detailed the entire robbery plan to him. On the basis of Mitchell’s information, the police obtained an arrest warrant for Crisp.
On June 15, 2001, Crisp, while driving a rented Pontiac Grand Am with Mitchell as a passenger, came upon a police license checkpoint. Crisp was unable to produce a valid driver’s license, and he advised the officers that his name was Jermaine Jackson. A small amount of marijuana was found in the vehicle. While Crisp was being interviewed, Mitchell informed the police of Crisp’s real identity, and the officers promptly learned of the outstanding warrant for Crisp’s arrest. Crisp was then taken into custody.
Torain was also arrested, and he was incarcerated in the same jail as Crisp. On June 20, 2001, as he walked past Crisp’s cell, a handwritten note (the “Note”) was slid out from under Crisp’s door. The Note, the last line of which was allegedly crossed out when delivered, stated:
Lamont You know if you don’t help me I am going to get life in prison, and you ain’t going to get nothing. Really it’s over for me if you don’t change what you told them. Tell them I picked you up down the street in Kathy’s car. Tell them that I don’t drive the Probe. Tell them Mike drove the Probe. He is the one that told on us. Tell them the gun and all that shit was Mike’s. That is what I am going to tell them tommoro.
During the investigation of the robbery, Crisp’s girlfriend, Katherine Bell, gave police officers consent to search both her residence in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and her car, a white Ford Escort. The officers found surgical gloves in the vehicle, and in her bedroom they discovered a bullet proof vest and a sawed-off shotgun. In the course of the investigation, the officers obtained palmprints and handwriting exemplars from Crisp.
Both Mitchell and Torain testified against Crisp at Crisp’s trial, which was conducted from September 10 through September 13, 2001, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Mitchell testified, inter alia, that on June 11, 2001, Crisp told him he needed to make some quick money and that he planned to rob a bank. Mitchell told the jury that Crisp then took him to the Central Carolina Bank, informed him that he (Crisp) and Lamont Torain were going to rob it, and asked if Mitchell would participate.
The following day, Mitchell, Crisp, and Torain discussed the robbery plan in further detail. Crisp showed Mitchell a bullet proof vest, a sawed-off shotgun, an automatic weapon, a mask, and clothing, all of which Crisp and Torain intended to use in the bank robbery. Mitchell further testified that Crisp had shown him the purple Ford Probe. According to Mitchell, the initial plan was that he and Torain would enter the bank, and Crisp would drive the getaway vehicle. The following morning, however, when Torain came to pick up Mitchell for the robbery, Mitchell begged off, explaining that he had to babysit his children.
Torain described to the jury a slightly different set of events. He asserted that it was Mitchell and Crisp who planned the robbery, and that, originally, it was he who was to drive the getaway vehicle. According to Torain, when Mitchell refused to participate, the plan changed: Torain entered the bank, while Crisp waited in the getaway car.
At trial, Mary Katherine Brannan, a fingerprint expert with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (“SBI”), testified that Crisp’s right palm had produced a latent print that had subsequently been recovered from the Note. Furthermore, a handwriting expert, Special Agent Thomas Currin, a “questioned document analyst” with the SBI, testified that Crisp had authored the Note.
Crisp presented an alibi defense. His cousin, Cecilia Pointer, claimed that, on the day of the robbery, her husband and Crisp came to her place of employment at approximately 12:30 p.m., and that the two men then left to submit applications at a temporary employment agency. She testified that they stopped back by her work around 1:00 p.m. or 1:15 p.m.
After the four-day jury trial, Crisp was found guilty of bank robbery, bank robbery with a dangerous weapon, and brandishing a firearm during and in relation to the bank robbery. On November 27, 2001, he received a sentence of 356 months of imprisonment and five years of supervised release. His notice of appeal was timely filed on November 27, 2001.”
CASE ANALYSIS
The case of Crisp certainly passed the Daubert standard. Experts’ testimony in the case helps build the guilty verdict. The case was not all about experts’ testimony. There was also the testimony of Crisp collaborator of the crime and physical evidences such as the gloves, vest and gun used in the crime plus the palm print on the note that is self- incriminating made by Crisp himself.
But all of these physical evidence lack grounds in court without an expert opinion on the matter. There were two experts invited to testify in court. They were Mary Katherine Brannan, a fingerprint expert with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (“SBI”) and a handwriting expert, Special Agent Thomas Currin.
Palm print analysis is like the hundred year old finger print analysis. It has honored for a very long time in courts around the world. It has been proven in the field of experts and public to be a reliable source of evidence. This kind of analysis can be validated out rightly specially with the use of advance technology today.
The testimony of Brannan, which is a known to be great analyst in North Carolina, made it more compelling for the jury to reach the guilty verdict. As a well known analyst in her field of work, Brannan met the one of the major standards in Daubert test- the expert’s stature in the scientific community. Special Agent Thomas Currin also qualified for such Daubert standard because he himself has been a hand writing expert for more than twenty years in his department.
Another factor that the case passed the Daubert standard was the empirically verifiable evidence of palm print and hand writing. Though easy to verify, it also had one factor that made it passed the Daubert standard- the use of scientific method. The analyses were made in a careful method in which to make sure an almost perfect result. Brannan also testified that the margin for error in the palm print analysis was zero. The experts’ opinions also met the standard of Daubert in terms of its easiness to comprehend. Even a jury can visibly see the hand writing and finger print match and can easily understand the process.
Therefore, the experts’ testimony in the case of Crisp passed the Daubert Test by having empirically verifiable evidences, clarity in the process of explaining evidence, experts’ good stature in their profession and by achieving the recognition from the experts’ community.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Berger, M. (2000). “The Supreme Court’s Trilogy on the Admissibility of Expert Evidence,” Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Washington D.C.: Federal Judicial Center.
- Kiely, T. (2005). Forensic Evidence: Science & The Criminal Law, 2e. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
- Berger, M. (2000). “The Supreme Court’s Trilogy on the Admissibility of Expert Evidence,” Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Washington D.C.: Federal Judicial Center.
- Dixon, L. & Gill, B. (2002). Changes in the Standards for Admitting Expert Evidence in Federal Civil Cases Since the Daubert Decision. Santa Monica: CA: RAND.
- Giannelli, P. (1994). “Daubert: Interpreting the Federal Rules of Evidence.” Cardoza Law Review 15: 1999-2026.
- Golan, T. (2004). Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
- Huber, P. (1993). Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom. NY: Basic Books.
- Jasanoff, S. (1997). Science at the Bar: Science and Technology in American Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
- Kiely, T. (2005). Forensic Evidence: Science ; The Criminal Law, 2e. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
- Lubet, S. (1999). Expert Testimony. NY: National Institute for Trial Advocacy.
- Spiegel, M. (1994). Admissibility of expert testimony: Daubert and Beyond. Washington D.C.: ABA Section on Litigation.
- Wecht, C. ; Rago, J. (Eds.) (2005). Forensic Science and Law. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
