What are expert witness qualifications.

 

 

There are several ways to determine whether someone is qualified to be an expert witness or not. To establish __________, the court usually inquires about the education, special training, skills and professional knowledge of a person. To establish this, the court lets both the hiring attorney and the opposing counsel to question the witness about his special abilities. The opposing counsel is provided with an opportunity to challenge ______________ and preclude him from being accepted by the court.

Once the individual is considered a valuable participant ___________, he will be permitted to give his opinions regarding the subject at hand however, if the court didn’t recognize this individual, he will not be allowed to give any testimony. Both __________ are allowed to attempt a tactic to recognize once expertise in a particular field. Typically, the hiring attorney meets with the witness to study their every move and answers. This helps in giving the witness a chance to be ready on everything he might come upon on the trial. ________ is a professional and has specialized knowledge in his field that is why it is very important to give the court a straight answer that is confident and easy to understand. This will help the witness to prove that his testimony is real. Also this will help __________ including the judge and the jury in determining and understanding difficult evidence. It is very important that the witness shows no fear and __________ in his testimony so that the jury can establish ________ in his words.

 

Переведите предложения на английский язык.

1. Судебным экспертом является лицо, обладающее специальными знаниями, назначенное судом в соответствии правилами для производства судебной экспертизы и дачи заключения.

2.Законодательство предъявляет специальные требования к судебному эксперту.

3. Основными критериями является высшее специальное образование, стаж работы и подтверждение квалификации.

4. Судебным экспертом, может быть гражданин, обладающий необходимыми для дачи заключения специальными знаниями в области науки и техники.

5. Согласно ст. 80 УПК РФ показания специалиста — сведения, сообщенные им на допросе об обстоятельствах, требующих специальных познаний, а также разъяснения своего мнения в соответствии с требованиями ст. 53, 168 и 271 УПК РФ.

6. Профессиональными качествами эксперта являются наблюдательность, внимание, гибкость, логичность, критичность ума, самостоятельность мышления, способность преодолеть предубеждение или предвзятость.

Переведите текст на русский язык письменно.

An expert is someone knowing more and more

about less and less, eventually knowing everything about nothing.

Attributed to Sir Bernard Spillsbury, MD

Neither natural scientists nor forensic scien­tists start from theories or laws when facing the need to explain some puzzling phenome­non. They start from data. And not from com­monplace data, but from the surprising anomalies raising the puzzles requiring ex­planation. Unusual observations suggest ex­planatory connections to pursue and test. Such connections define evidence,and distinguish data that are evidence from data that remains merely coincidental. In that effort, the natural scientist and the forensic scientist share a fundamental approach belying any simplistic distinction between real science and forensicscience.

Usually scientific or other experts offered by attorneys to the court as potential expert witnesses give opinions only within their areas of expertise. Sometimes, lawyers hire an expert simply because the other side hired one first. But, usually, lawyers engage experts when the facts of a case remain unclear, when analytical procedures in some field might help clarify those facts, or when specialized training can help educate the jury in turn to help the jurors make better informed deci­sions. The goal remains to apply some reliable method to those facts to help the court render its decisions. For forensic scientists, it's all about reliable scientific methods.

 

14. Прочитайте текст. Составьте план текста и озаглавьте его.

TEXT

(Title)_________________________________________________

1._________________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________________

3._________________________________________________________________________

4._________________________________________________________________________

 

 

Attempting to characterize reliable scientific methods, as if describing some lifeless nonex­istent abstraction, remains doomed to failure. There simply is no such generalized abstrac­tion available to describe. At most, we can point toward a simple list detailing some of the many features reliable methods imple­ment, enabling the productive scientific in­vestigation of facts before the court. Reliable methods:

 

ü Help to distinguish evidence from co­incidence without ambiguity.

ü Allow alternative results to be ranked by some principle basic to the sciences applied.

^ü Allow for certainty considerations wherever appropriate through this ranking of relevant available alternatives.

ü Disallow hypotheses more extraor­dinary than the facts themselves.

ü Pursue general impressions to the level of specific details.

ü Pursue testing by breaking hy­potheses (alternative explanations) into their smallest logical components, risking one part at a time.

ü Allow tests either to prove or to disprove alternative explanations (hypotheses).

 

In the forensic sciences, we reason from a set of given results (a crime scene, for example) to their probable explanations (hopefully, a link to the perpetrator). The aims of forensic science rest with developing justified explanations. But obviously not all forensic explanations are alike. Some involve entirely appropriate statistical assessments and degrees of error suitably dependent on ac­curate mathematical models and accurate population studies. However, not all foren­sic scientific explanations involve such statistical issues. Instead, individual, nonrepeatable events with no statistical character­istics may demand scientific explanation.

All reliably constructed scientific explana­tions are best viewed by their creators as works in progress. We could always learn additional facts that may alter our views. Sometimes, how­ever, no additional information would be rele­vant. In either case, our opinions must be held with what American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce called contrite fallibilism. By this is meant an awareness of how much we do not know, and the humility to acknowledge the possibility of making mistakes. He describes this intellectual stance to a friend in personal correspondence.

This basic intellectual stance remains necessary both for essential humility and for the very possibility of scientific advance. Forensic scientists must develop an intellect not too sure of what must remain uncertain, not too uncertain about what must remain sure. In the spirit of intellectual honesty and judicial prudence, the best advice for the forensic scientist to carry from the scene to the lab and into court throughout a long ca­reer comes from a 20th century Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Whereof one can not speak," he said, "thereof one must remain silent."

Ethics relating to the scientific method:

 

A. The forensic scientist has a truly scientific spirit and should be inquiring, progressive, logical and unbiased.

B. The true scientist will make adequate examination of all materials, applying those tests essential to proof. They will not, merely for the sake of bolstering their conclusions, utilize unwarranted and superfluous tests in an attempt to give apparent greater weight to the results.

C. The modern scientific mind is an open one, incompatible with secrecy of method. Scientific analyses will not be conducted by “secret process”, nor will conclusions in case work be based upon such tests and experiments as will not be revealed to the profession.

D. A proper scientific method demands reliability of validity in the materials analyzed. Conclusions will not be drawn from materials which themselves appear unrepresentative, atypical or unreliable.

E. A truly scientific method requires that no generally discredited or unreliable procedure be utilized in the analysis.

F. The progressive worker will keep abreast of new developments in scientific methods and in all cases view them with an open mind. This is not to say that they need not be critical of untried or unproven methods, but they will recognize superior methods when they are introduced.

15. Ответьте на вопросы.

 

1. What is the text about?

2. What reliable scientific methods are mentioned in the text?

3. Are they described in detail?

4. What have you learnt about forensic explanations?

5. How are the constructed scientific explana­tions viewed?

6. What does contrite fallibilism mean?

7. What advice for the forensic scientist is given by the author?

8. What ethical considerations should be taken to applying different scientific methods

for forensic examination?

 

16. Сравните информацию из приведенной ниже схемы с информацией, содержащейся в тексте. Может ли данная схема служить планом данного текста? Если Ваш ответ отрицательный, то скажите, какие сведения необходимо добавить.