Case Law and Forensic Science

Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals

Case Law and Forensic Science

Case Law and Forensic Science

The Frye Standard had been the base by which expert testimony was introduced in federal courts until the Supreme Court case of Daubert vs. Merrel Dow Pharmaceuticals in 1993. The Daubert Standard would come to replace the Frye Standard in federal court. Although state would not be held by that standard they would follow suit by looking toward federal case law in decisions involving expert testimony. “If scientific or technical knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or determine a fact, "a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion" (A. Maskin, 1998). The case has basically made all evidence deemed reliable, relevant to a case admissible under the Daubert Standard. The use and acceptability of the Daubert Standard in lieu of the previously used Frye Standard of expert evidentiary applications has allowed for lesser academically accepted scientific evidence such as friction ridge skin evidence to be presented in federal court cases whereas the Frye standard would have excluded the use of friction ridge skin evidence as not widely or commonly accepted in the general field of which it derives.

The Frye Standard looked at the evidentiary admissibility of evidence by the method of which it was obtained and acceptable within the field of science in which it pertained (A. Schwartz, 1997). In the case of Frye vs. United States the defendant had been subjected to a deception test which determined his guilt or innocence through the levels of his systolic blood pressure. An expert witness was introduced to explain ...

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Maskin, A., & Cailteux, K. (1998, March). The Supreme Court Establishes Standard of Review

for Daubert Decisions and Reaffirms District Court. Retrieved from Weil website:

http://www.weil.com/news/pubdetail.aspx?pub=3467

Mcroberts, A. (1998). Is Friction Ridge Identification a Science? The Print, 14(1), 4-5.

Rice, P. R., & Delker, E. W. (2000). American University Washington College of Law

Short History of Too Little Consequence. Unpublished manuscript, American University Washington College of Law, Washington, DC.

Schwartz, A. (1997). Harvard Journal of A "Dogma of Empiricism" Revisited:

Daubert and Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and the Need to Resurrect the Philological Insight of Frye V. United States. Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 10(2).