More about expert witnesses:
Your case may require the use of expert witnesses to educate the judge and jury about complex scientific or psychological factors relevant to your case. A good criminal defense lawyer knows how to obtain and use the best expert witnesses for your defense. I regularly employ expert witnesses for the defense in criminal cases, including experts in pathology, toxicology, psychology regarding issues of competency and insanity, memory, eye witness testimony, handwriting and fingerprint analysis, document examination, police interrogation techniques, coerced confessions, and child psychology. If you don’t have the funds for the needed expert witnesses, I can apply for State funds to pay these costs. I know how to obtain the tools necessary to a good defense.
In OWI/DUI drunk driving cases, expert witnesses for the defense can help demonstrate to the jury the fallibility of the testing machine, and the erroneous assumptions on which the breath to blood ratio underlying the reported blood alcohol level is based. Hiring a toxicology expert, or an expert in alcohol absorption rates, may give you a viable defense, and allow your lawyer to demonstrate to the jury that there is reasonable doubt in your case.
Expert witnesses can be the key to presenting a successful defense in cases involving allegations of sexual abuse. Abuse often causes injury. You may need an expert who can testify about the absence of injury or the possible causes of injury to an alleged victim other than sexual abuse.
The State may present laboratory analysis of bodily fluids to try to prove the charges against you. Having your own expert in toxicology, pharmacology, chemistry, pathology, or DNA evidence, will help to even the playing field.
When confronting claims of child abuse, the defense attorney must analyze all contact the child had with others who may have tainted the child’s memory or perceptions. Did the police or others who interviewed the child about his reported abuse ask leading or suggestive questions? Has the process of suggestive questioning led the child to believe falsely that he or she was abused? An expert in psychology, trained in the proper protocol for conducting child witnesses interviews, can help the defense analyze what happened and assist in the important task of explaining to the jury how the child has come to believe something happened, when it did not.
Adolescents who make false claims of abuse may do so in an effort to manipulate the adults who exercise control over them. Teachers, coaches, parents, grandparents and others who have a role in disciplining teenagers, can find themselves locked up and charged with serious sex crimes because a young person has lied to a mandatory reporter who reported the allegation to DHS. In these cases, psychological experts can assist the defense in understanding the capabilities of adolescents to lie, and their limited ability to fully comprehend the gravity of making false criminal charges. Psychological experts can assist the defense by explaining how adolescents behave, and why they may be lying.
When you are facing drug charges, the state will generally be required to present scientific evidence to prove the substance in question is an illegal drug. The state’s crime lab is closely linked to other law enforcement agencies. The fact that this lab is operated as a law enforcement lab raises the potential for testing procedures and/or test results to be compromised in favor of law enforcement. In order to overcome this bias, and to test the validity of reported results, your case may need the assistance of a scientific expert to retest the substance, or to evaluate the procedures used by the state lab in their testing. A defense expert can identify potential sources for contamination of the samples tested by the state lab, and can assist the defense in explaining complex scientific issues to the jury.