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Pediatr Radiol (2013) 43:135139 DOI 10.1007/s00247-012-2539-3
EDITORIAL
What do pediatric healthcare experts really need to know about Daubert and the rules of evidence?
Jolle Anne Moreno
Received: 25 September 2012 /Accepted: 3 October 2012 /Published online: 1 December 2012 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
Background
Pediatricians, pediatric radiologists and neuroradiologists render countless medical opinions on a daily basis. When physicians use their specialized medical knowledge and sophisticated evaluative methods and tools to diagnose child abuse, their opinions shape and may even determine legal decisions in the juvenile, family and criminal courts. These out-of-court evaluations and in-court expert opinions frequently help courts decide cases involving abusive head trauma/shaken baby syndrome (AHT/SBS). In these cases, defense attorneys and their retained medical witnesses have increasingly challenged the scientific foundations for abuse diagnoses and this purported scientific controversy has been echoed in the medical and legal literature and the popular press.
Daubert and the admissibility of expert evidence
Expert witness testimony is governed by specific evidentiary rules and case law in each state. Although medical expert witnesses are traditionally asked to provide their opinions to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, this is confusingly not the legal standard for the admission of expert opinion testimony. The United States Supreme Court set the current admissibility standard for expert evidence in the federal courts in 1993 in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., [1], and to date 30 state courts have adopted the Daubert standard [2]. Even in states that have not adopted Daubert, most state court judges report that Daubert has had a
powerful influence on their decisions to admit, exclude or limit expert evidence [3].
In Daubert, the Supreme Court abandoned the nine-decade-old Frye [4] standard, which had permitted judges to admit or exclude scientific evidence based solely on a determination of whether the evidence was generally accepted within the relevant scientific community [1]. According to the Supreme Court, Frye had not survived the adoption of the Federal Rules of Evidence (in the mid-1970s), which governed the admissibility of scientific evidence but did not contain a general acceptance standard. Instead, the Daubert Court decided that judges should serve as gatekeepers to protect the courts from invalid scientific information. Future judges would need to determine whether expert evidence is scientific...