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Introduction
Imagine being convicted on the basis of ear-print evidence for an offence you have not committed, even when such evidence is known to be unreliable and not accepted by the wider scientific community. Alternatively, consider being placed in prison for murder on the sole basis of a dog detecting your scent after an article of your clothing has been placed in a coffee can. Or what of being accused and placed on remand for allegedly bringing a giraffe and elephant into a Sunday school as part of suspected ritual abuse of children; later killing these animals and hanging the children upside down from chandeliers on the (incorrect) basis that children as young as three or four have intact memories and are not suggestible? These may sound like plot lines from movie scripts, but they are not, having already been played out in courts, leading to convictions later questioned or overturned (i.e. R v Dallagher, 2002; Winfrey v The State of Texas, 2010; Dale Akiki (1994), respectively). In all cases, experts proffered their evidence to be reliable, rigorous, scientific, and of the highest quality.
Such evidence from experts is commonly considered under the broad definition of “opinion evidence” (Tapper, 2010). This fails to allot such evidence the focused attention it requires, particularly considering the increased significance of expert scientific evidence in courts (Roberts and Zuckerman, 2010). Expert evidence is known to appreciably influence decision-making, particularly if considered “scientific” (Ormerod and Roberts, 2006). Science though is a fluid concept, where new techniques and approaches are constantly evolving (Roberts and Zuckerman, 2010) and where it can be perceived to hold definitive and reliable answers when this is not the case (Ormerod and Roberts, 2006). It is further assumed that it can be easily communicated to lay audiences, when in reality the evaluation of scientific evidence is complex (Law Commission, 2009; Law Commission Report, 2011) and challenging to test (Redmayne, 2001).
Methods for testing the reliability of expert opinion evidence are crucial, with particular focus on what is termed “evidential reliability” or rather “trustworthiness” (Law Commission, 2009; Law Commission Report, 2011). Evidential reliability concerning the scientific opinion evidence offered by expert witnesses will form the focus of this paper as opposed to other areas of concern...