High Court Relaxes Curbs on Expert Witness Testimony : Law: Ruling praised by backers of flexibility. Business interests also claim victory in birth-defects case.
The Supreme Court significantly loosened restrictions on testimony by expert witnesses Monday, ruling that juries can hear opinions outside the scientific mainstream.
Despite the unanimous decision in a California birth-defects case, both sides claimed satisfaction.
Proponents of allowing new, but not generally accepted, scientific data into evidence hailed the court’s relaxed guidelines. Business interests said, however, that even though the decision cancels a rule that has scuttled many damage suits in drug and toxic waste cases, it still gives judges substantial power to prevent “junk science” from entering the courtroom.
For two deformed San Diego boys who sued a drug company in the case, the high court left it to a local judge to determine whether to allow testimony linking their defects to an anti-nausea drug taken by their mother, Joyce Daubert, during pregnancy.
Such testimony by eight expert witnesses had been blocked by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on grounds that their opinions were not “generally accepted” in the scientific community, as required by a 1923 Supreme Court decision.
The experts’ unpublished findings contradict 30 studies on 130,000 women that show no connection between numerous children with birth defects and Bendectin, a prenatal drug made by Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc.
On Monday, the Supreme Court, ruling in Daubert vs. Merrell Dow, 92-102, reversed the appeals panel, holding that flexible rules of evidence enacted by Congress in 1975 superseded the 1923 standard, thus giving judges wider latitude to admit expert testimony.
Nevertheless, the court said that judges should act as a “gatekeeper,” screening evidence to ensure that juries hear information that is “not only relevant but reliable.”
“Proposed testimony must be supported by appropriate validation--i.e., ‘good grounds,’ based on what is known,” Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote for the court.
Blackmun said that judges must consider certain factors in the screening process, including whether a theory can be tested, whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication and whether it has attracted “widespread acceptance.”
However, Blackmun hedged on these guidelines, saying that “in some instances well-grounded but innovative theories will not have been published”--and “a particular degree of acceptance” in the scientific community is not required.
In the wake of such vagueness, lawyers on both sides of the case claimed victory, disagreeing on how rigorous the court’s screening guidelines are.
“The court unanimously rejected the ‘general-acceptance’ test that most federal courts have used for decades to deprive juries of potentially helpful new scientific information,” said Kenneth J. Chesebro, a Cambridge, Mass., attorney representing the Daubert family. “It imposed some minimal threshold tests to assure that real science is being relied on.”
Similarly, Joan E. Bertin of New York, counsel for a group of doctors, lawyers and scientists favoring broader evidence rules, said it was significant that the court did not require several tough screening tests sought by business groups and their lawyers.
“The court has gone out of its way to be very flexible. It said juries are not too stupid to figure it out when evidence is not reliable,” Bertin said.
On the other hand, Charles Fried, attorney for Merrell Dow, proclaimed “a terrific win” because the court adopted screening “standards that we proposed.”
He predicted that the proposed expert testimony on behalf of the Daubert family will be “thrown out as total garbage.”
Likewise, John G. Kester of the American Tort Reform Assn. called Monday’s ruling “very helpful” to business, saying that the court “has given clear direction to federal judges to keep junk science out of the courtroom.”
And Richard A. Meserve, representing the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences, said he was “very pleased” despite the need for tougher screening standards.
“The other side wanted almost no screening at all,” he said.
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