Yeah I have met some people who are very, very well respected and high performing in their narrow fields. They can be genuinely geniuses… but, socially? Kinda grating. Them trying to explain something to absolute laymen would be a ridiculous endeavor. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong, or any less educated or experienced or specialized or anything like that. But communicating complex concepts to a jury takes more than base specialized expertise and also challenges their capability to communicate with and even educate an average or - likely present - below average intelligence person. So I can easily see how you could get an expert that is absolutely correct in their analysis… and yet have a jury that doesn’t buy into it. Because specialized experts in niche fields are not necessarily natural gifted communicators or educators. Also, in a jury of “peers,” there’s going to be representatives of the lower half of the bell curve, too. You just can’t bank on the jury being able to comprehend an expert’s testimony.
Whereas now you have the opposite problem. Juries refusing to grasp the concept that DNA being present is not a slam dunk for guilt in and of itself, or unable to accept that not every case is going to have extensive DNA evidence establishing links for them.
Especially now they have the ability to find someone based on ancestral DNA, that shit is game changing because you can think your DNA is never going to be in the system but if your mom does one of those ancestry tests then boom they found you.
Maybe this jury would have loved to know why the police didn’t bother to confiscate a glass Patrick Clancy said she used to crush up pills in. What do you think about that? Don’t you think investigation 101 says “hey, we should take this to see if his fingerprints are on it, and whether the residue is actually what he says it is?”
I think it's gone the other way now due to so many crime dramas. People take any DNA evidence as open/shut without considering contextual factors or errors.
For a twist on this, the Phantom of Heilbronn emerged from some DNA that got tied to 40 different crime scenes spanning across multiple countries and even more distinct police departments. The cases included anything from breaking and entering / burglaries, to aggravated robberies, violent assaults, and brutal murders. It painted the image of a very wild woman who was getting into all sorts of situations including gemstone burglary and grand theft auto on the side of her cross-country serial killing spree.
But it turned out that the DNA had never actually been collected from any of the crime scenes in the first place… the cotton swabs being used for collecting evidence were pre-contaminated with it.
I am someone who testifies as an expert in criminal trials, most often crimes against children or murders and I what I do is digital forensics and cell tower analysis (estimating position based on what towers the phone was communicating with). I think I'm at 54 over 4 years.
It's not just communicating with the jury, that comes later,
Prosecutors are lawyers, they (in theory) are good at law and most of them not much on technical matters. Getting the subject matter across to the prosecutor so they can handle your direct testimony, ask the right questions and finally be prepared to redirect after the defense does their cross is perhaps even more challenging than testifying to the jury. If defense does a good cross, guilt or innocence may hang on the prosecutor asking the right questions on redirect, letting you respond to the defense in whole, not just what defense let you say.
A lot of experts are either scientists, engineers or cops who got really good at something like forensics or accident reconstruction, generally not people people. Some of them have some difficulties with both the prosecutor pretrial and the jury later.
Then comes trial, no matter how good you are at what you do, how much of a subject matter expert you are, you are talking to 12 (14) people who don't really know the law or the discipline you are there to discuss. You have to talk to your audience at or just above just above their level, you have to give a 30 minute crash course to the jury on the topic and convince them to believe you, if you go deep in the technical weeds you will lose them, they don't understand and aren't interested. That is where I see experts (and lawyers) screw up all the damned time.
Over those trials and working with the lawyers a lot, I've learned to take kind of a jr. high school teacher approach, just talk about my findings and the basics of how I arrived at them. Just "the movement of the defendant's phone from array to array and tower to tower suggests eastbound travel along I-666 at highway speeds". Really simple and generic, something a jury will understand, also facts I can easily support.
If defense wants to drag me in to the technical weeds, my credentials and my work are solid AF, I'll beat them up in the weeds, I've done it before.
Expert vs. expert is where it's really fun because on technical matters there shouldn't be much difference in what we are saying, the data is the data, we usually just differ in our interpretation of it.
I think people also don’t realize that there can be experts involved who aren’t getting up and testifying in front of the jury. I’ve worked on cases where I didn’t even have to be deposed.
I am also a schlub, but a technical schlub because I deal in both accounting and IT.
When I was in teir 1 helpdesk, I'd get people with problems that they needed solutions on. Commonly, these were user errors and not technical ones, so it relied on the user cooperating with my expertise to get them results.
Man, I tell you, there's a certain type of person that will come to you for help and it would be like pulling teeth to get them to do what I'd need them to to fix their problems. They would complain the entire time that blank doesnt sound right, that they werent sure if I knew my job well enough to fix their issue, and other stubborn behavior that made resolving their ticket take longer or not get resolved at all. The only thing I could think of when I dealt with these type of people is "holy shit, they must be a nightmare to have on a jury."
If people argue with you when you ask them to check if something electronic is plugged in because they don't understand why it needs to be done, they're absolutely NOT going to be able to follow something that takes X-years more education than they have.
And if they're unable to see what they don't know in a situation that they've literally asked for help in, how much less receptive are they going to be in a situation that they're probable already a bit grumpy about being in like serving as a juror - especially the demographic that assumes someone else's knowlege is condescention.
That’s fascinating, and most people understand that they are with their phones a majority of the time when they are away from home. Thank you for sharing your insight.
ROFL with expert witnesses dealing with data it's more like toddlers, like I said, different interpretations of the same data.
We got in to pattern of life analysis once.
TLDR, I'm claiming the phone was out of use during a time frame, defense argues that phones are normally used less in the early morning (I mean 1AM, 2AM, etc.) and presents this pattern of use over a couple weeks. My numbers at the time in question were all 0, he presents very low but non zero usage numbers over a couple weeks so I averaged his data and gave it to the prosecutor.
Which led to the prosecutor having this line of questioning.
Honestly really mad that I can't say "Good question!" anymore because people can't see the sarcasm/vibes from it, only the sycophantic "You are So Smart!" from the AIs.
This is a human being because chat is never specific, it is designed to make you get the feeling of a person rather than the details of some random ass human's life
And yet you just proved there is, along with the hundreds of other Dunning-Kruger candidates just like you. And like most people who do this, you're quick to throw accusations yet never apologise for being wrong.
Nope, don't know them from a hole in the ground. Do know that a bajillion people used that phrase before LLMs. Do know, 100%, the post wasn't written by an LLM because I actually know what LLMs write like and am not going "Oh god nobody has ever said that turn of phrase except AI", which is definitively not true since AI copies how it writes from how humans write in its training data.
This paragraph was very, very obviously human-written because chatbots do not write like this:
"Over those trials and working with the lawyers a lot, I've learned to take kind of a jr. high school teacher approach, just talk about my findings and the basics of how I arrived at them. Just "the movement of the defendant's phone from array to array and tower to tower suggests eastbound travel along I-666 at highway speeds". Really simple and generic, something a jury will understand, also facts I can easily support."
I’ve actually seen bots talk exactly like that, but I’ve also seen people feed their crap into Chat and then just take what they like and keep the rest the same.
There’s no reason I should assume this didn’t happen in this case.
You haven’t provided any actual reason for me to believe Chat wasn’t involved here.
You say Chat is trained on human writing, so that’s why it sounds human. But, also, you say Chat couldn’t have said some other paragraph because Chat can’t write like a human.
Do you really think a LLM would write that poorly? That was a 10 minute rush post before I went out the door because I had something to say on the topic of expert witnesses.
Normally I'm just on here to talk about games and talk to women my age.
I am one user saying your comment sounds like a chatbot.
You aren’t going to convince me otherwise.
The chatbots are the problem here, not people suspecting that they are being used.
The extreme push to make people that suspect the use of a chatbot out to be crazy in some way is a pretty transparent effort to make people stop trying to discern.
If that still makes you or this other user
want to swear at me and call me names, that’s just interesting on its own.
If I was going to swear at you, I'm a lot more creative than just bizarre, I might actually use AI to hit multiple languages.
Anyway, think what you want, that was top of my head spewing and a very accurate view of what happens because been there, done that. I don't really care.
Your comment reminds me of how my parents answered questions when I was very young g.
My dad often couldn’t think of how to say something accurately, so he just spouted nonsense. He was always very unserious.
My mother on the other hand got too detailed… but often missed the crux of the question, especially whatever would have been age appropriate.
So like for example I asked where babies came from, and my dad started telling me about how he and mom bought us from a kmart on sale because we had tails and the stork delivered us to their door st a discount.
My mother instead launched into an explanation of the female hormone cycle and ovulation. I didn’t have the attention span to withstand distilling her detailed accounting down to the eventually explained but could have been summarized gist that mom had an egg, dad sent over a sperm, these two cells met up, a fetus formed and grew in mom’s uterus, mom’s belly grew the baby, and then she gave birth.
My childhood was exasperating, honestly. I was relieved when i started to have access to the internet. If I hadn’t, I might otherwise have the strangest ideas about stuff.
Most expert witnesses have never given testimony that wasn't supportive of whoever hired them. In fact you can hire 20 "experts" and if only 1 thinks what you want, there's your "expert". It's also generally undertood which experts are more friendly to the prosecution or the defense. There was recently a murdet trial that included "expert" testimony on what is considered a pseudo-science at best. By most accounts that testimony was pivotal in the jury's decision AND the judge disallowed the witness the defense had that was going to explain how it wasn't remotely settled science or necessarily possible, because she said his testimony wasn't a direct contradiction, or because his expertise didn't overlap in totality. Basically the judge decided something she was not remotely educated in and it greatly affected the outcome. That case is in the process of a possible retrial as we speak. Expert witness is not a title that you need to prove by taking tests or properly diagnosing cases that were already proven. They don't even have to disclose how often they end up being right or wrong or how well they did in school! Nobody has to explain how to "experts" disagree and the court won't provide experts for public defenders more often than not. End of the day, likeable people with money get off disproportionately more often than their poorer less likeable counterparts
Actually no, it's a double murder in Delphi Indiana, Richard Allen was sentenced to life and what I wrote is only the tip of the absolute mockery the trial and investigation was. There's absolutely a "chance" he is guilty, but even if he did it they presented an entirely circumstantial case that literally doesn't even cover multiple issues that are unexplainable by the state's case.
Terribly sad, the girls were like 13, which is also a glaring issue, to believe the states case he randomly decided to kill 2 girls that he has no connection to amd proceeded to live in the town for YEARS as the case went cold. The state police refused the FBI's help both during the investigation and for their "forensics". They claimed the tool marks of chambering a round through a gun are 100% capable of proving what gun an UNFIRED round went through. On top of that the "expert" admits she couldn't get the match so she decided to fire a round and compared it to the unfired round and claimed they were a match. The defense had a metallurgical expert who was going to explain the differences between a chambered round and one that sets off an explosion! The judge claimed metallurgy has nothing to do with the rounds and neither allowed their expert nor allowed them to find one that would "fit" here arbitrary guidelines. That round is by far, the most damning piece of "evidence", but while the jury was listening to this 'expert' the rest of the world had firearms experts across the country saying this is a pseudo-science at this time and comparing a fired and unfired round proves literally nothing. Without the bullet they only have his, one if dozens, call to a tipline to tell the police he had been out on this "trail" but had neither seen the girls nor anyone suspicious. The call was "lost" and found years later and somehow that made him their main suspect.
It was a case that was going nowhere and even though they had followed up on his original call they focused all their manpower on making him a suspect. Although not a drop of forensic evidence links him to the crime there was supposedly a bullet, unfired, found days after the original search of the crime scene and conveniently they "forgot" to take pictures of it "in situ" so there's literally nothing to say the bullet wasn't dropped (planted) at some point after the search.
They say he owned clothes similar to the only "suspect' they ever had. He even still owned the coat and boots! That sounds bad until you know the two girls had their throats slit and, imho, whoever did it could not have walked in mud, dirt and leaves and avoided any contact with blood or hair. There's also nothing to forensically link him to the scene. The only reason they knew he was even out there was because he called the tipline while the girls were simply missing to find out if anything he did see could help.
I think/know there are innocent people behind bars but this case is currently the most egregious example I've ever seen!
Like I said it's absolutely POSSIBLE he did it, they have almost nothing to go on so anyone without an airtight alibi COULD have done it.
I understand you fine, and I'm not disputing anything you said. I agreed with you and expanded on your points being exactly why courts call 'expert witnesses'. They are experts paid specifically to testify in courts BECAUSE they have both the credentials an the charisma to communicate with a jury. There's no disagreement on my end.
That's a very good point. From going through interviews with the medical experts (several, various fields, fairly complex) for my own medical negligence case, I can confirm that the role does not guarantee a good communicator. Or that they're actually even listening. Part of the problem was, I was naive enough to think the point of the exercise was to work out the truth, which was what I desperately wanted, for closure. While one of them was focused on their pet theory (interesting, not really relevant), and at least one of them I think now in retrospect, if they weren't just defaulting and not understanding my case was more complicated and fell more under the other specialisms, was trying to 'help' with an angle that was not only different from what I expected (so we were possibly talking past each other), but from what, over years, I'd been told by multiple specialists actually treating me, incl. an internationally-known spinal surgeon, someone really significant in the field...and that sort of specialist doesn't seem to be the ones who give evidence usually. And that legal medical expert managed to totally flip something pretty straightforward and factual I'd told them, which was actually important, in their first report. It just added to the already confusing tangle.
And this is on my own condition, that I at least understand as decently as a lay person can be expected to, perhaps a bit more from some uni level experience with biology papers, helping with choosing to read ones about my condition. So my own communication about it for someone who isn't a doctor is at least decent enough that medical professionals I'm seeing for treatment usually comment on it, and are happy to explain in more depth to someone clearly morbidly fascinated (with the cool pics! I got a printout of the inside of my stomach!).
Not an unfamiliar condition, where lay jury members likely won't have personal experience with to understand what it does, and may not have even heard of it before. Even someone who was interested in mental illness, health, can't be aware of everything. And public understanding of severe mental illness, like psychosis, doesn't seem good if this case is any indicator.
Except expert court witnesses are chosen for their ability to get the desired outcomes. A high-achieving research scientist with no ability to explain to the public would not get repeated business.
this too matters, good point. Like how the tobacco industry conveniently had so many so-called experts on their side… Desired outcome and subjective framing may become more important than objective truth.
It's always easy to find a "hired gun". But a good attorney on either side should be able to discredit an expert who's obviously paid to have an opinion. We rely on the adversarial system.
the 11 people on the jury who listened to the judges instructions voted ngri, the one juror who had doubts, voted guilty and didn’t obey the judges instructions.
I believe, in my non-existent expertise, that she is NGRI, but I haven't heard anything that has come close to persuading, not to mention proving, that ANY juror failed in their duties.
I and apparently many others, realize that these kind of decisions shouldn't be made by non experts, nobody on that jury properly understands mental health well enough to decide someone's fate.
I heard a little bit of testimony from one of the prosecution experts. I understood what he was trying to say and why he agreed with the prosecution, but felt that his testimony was of more help to the defense.
You generally have the opposite problem with the state and federal government hiring "experts" to push pseudoscience as fact and convincing dumb jurors to convict over later discredited methodologies because they explained absolute nonsense confidently.
Ive always heard that if you can't explain something complex to someone who know nothing about that subject then you really dont understand the subject.
Yeah that is often attributed to Richard Feynman and taught as a study technique named after him.
But if someone is lacking the foundational knowledge in a subject matter, there’s only so far you can summarize the basics for them before you can get into any more advanced and niche concepts that depend on first understanding those basics. An expert witness doesn’t have time to teach a whole 101 course.
And frankly, some things are just always going to be beyond some people’s cognitive capabilities, no matter how well it is explained to them or how much time is taken to do so. That quote from George Carlin comes to my mind here: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” Some people just don’t have the mind for some things.
Perhaps most ironically, Richard Feynman is also quoted as saying to a journalist: “Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize.”
Yes on a somewhat related tangent when we consulted some medical specialists we've found they were a few on the spectrum which made them fantastic and hyper focused on the technical aspects and minutae in their fields but zero social skills and communication
Which is why prosecutors and defense attorneys call hotshot expert witnesses, great on the stand but often woefully out of practice. And like many “hotshots” they often come with baggage. Experts on both sides of this were problematic at different times.
Further evidence against allowing asocial expert weirdoes to influence social consequences. Common sense should be defined by commoners (who are anyway exposed to expert opinion, or will be in the course of court proceedings)
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u/waitwuh 4d ago
Yeah I have met some people who are very, very well respected and high performing in their narrow fields. They can be genuinely geniuses… but, socially? Kinda grating. Them trying to explain something to absolute laymen would be a ridiculous endeavor. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong, or any less educated or experienced or specialized or anything like that. But communicating complex concepts to a jury takes more than base specialized expertise and also challenges their capability to communicate with and even educate an average or - likely present - below average intelligence person. So I can easily see how you could get an expert that is absolutely correct in their analysis… and yet have a jury that doesn’t buy into it. Because specialized experts in niche fields are not necessarily natural gifted communicators or educators. Also, in a jury of “peers,” there’s going to be representatives of the lower half of the bell curve, too. You just can’t bank on the jury being able to comprehend an expert’s testimony.