Concurrent Expert Testimony as a Potential Remedy for Expert Witness Partisanship

当证据是技术性的或难以理解时，专家可以提供证词，帮助陪审员评估证据。然而，专家可能会偏向雇用他们的一方，律师可能会寻找那些故意偏袒他们的证词或通过交叉询问使专家看起来不值得信任的专家。同时作证是一种被认为是为了纠正专家党派偏见的做法：案件双方的专家开会讨论案件并产生联合报告，他们在审判期间一起作证，并由对方和对方的律师交叉询问。根据态度-行为关系和说服理论，PI提出了三项研究来检验这种同步证词技术对专家、陪审员和律师行为的影响。在第一项研究中，专家将生成法医报告，并在对抗或并行程序下作证。专家的产品将根据极端和偏见的迹象进行编码。在第二项研究中，社区成员将在包含对抗性或并发专家证词的审判模拟中充当模拟陪审员，以检查并发专家证词是否减少了陪审员对启发式线索（例如，来源可信度）的依赖，并增加了对支持特定判决的证据强度变化的敏感性。在第三项研究中，PI将调查律师是否选择不同的（可能不那么公正的）专家，或者在使用并行而不是对抗性专家程序时改变他们的审查策略。这些研究的结果将提供有价值的信息，关于专家偏见的并行补救的有效性，并阐明心理机制的专家偏见的减少和事实发现者决策的改进当这种补救措施实施。这些研究将评估专家党派偏见的补救措施的有效性，并为今后可以作出的政策决定提供证据。

When evidence is technical or difficult to understand, experts may provide testimony that assists jurors in evaluating the evidence. However, experts may become biased toward the side that has hired them and attorneys may seek experts who will deliberately bias their testimony or may make experts seem untrustworthy through cross-examination. Concurrent testimony is a practice that is presumed to remedy expert partisanship: experts for both sides in a case meet to discuss the case and generate a joint report, they testify together during trial, and are cross-examined by one another and the attorney for the opposing side.Relying on theories of attitude-behavior relationships and persuasion, the PI proposes three studies to examine the effects of this concurrent testimony technique on the behavior of experts, jurors, and attorneys. In the first study, experts will generate forensic reports and testify under adversarial or concurrent procedures. The experts' products will be coded for indications of extremity and bias. In the second study, community members will act as mock jurors in a trial simulation containing adversarial or concurrent expert testimony to examine whether concurrent expert testimony reduces jurors' reliance on heuristic cues (e.g., source credibility) and increases sensitivity to variation in the strength of the evidence supporting a particular verdict. In a third study, the PI will investigate whether attorneys select different (perhaps less impartial) experts or change their examination strategies when using concurrent rather than adversarial expert procedures.The results of these studies will provide valuable information about effectiveness of the concurrent expert remedy for expert partisanship and elucidate the psychological mechanisms underlying the reduction in expert bias and the improvement of fact-finder decision making when this remedy is implemented. These studies will evaluate the effectiveness of a remedy for expert partisanship and provide evidence on which future policy decisions could be made.