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Expert evidence: dangers and the enhancement of reasoning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2024

Peter Charleton  and
Ivan Rakhmanin
Peter Charleton*
Affiliation:
Judge of the High Court of Ireland since 2006 and of the Supreme Court of Ireland since 2014. He was lecturer in criminal law at Trinity College Dublin and is now adjunct professor of criminal law and criminology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. Charleton is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin.
Ivan Rakhmanin
Affiliation:
Former judicial assistant assigned to the Supreme Court of Ireland, and is currently a trainee solicitor at A&L Goodbody, Dublin, Ireland. Rakhmanin is also a graduate of Trinity College Dublin.
*
Correspondence Charleton Peter. Email: [email protected]
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Summary

This article considers the role of experts and their interaction with the legal system to better understand the benefits and potential dangers of expert evidence to fact-finders in trials. Medical experts are indispensable to the administration of justice as litigation ranges beyond what judges or juries comfortably deal with as facts of everyday life. This would render courts, absent expert evidence, vastly under-equipped in making decisions of fact. However, the dangers of surrendering authority to experts or of misunderstanding their role must be considered to ensure that expert evidence is used to benefit the administration of justice.

Keywords

Expert evidencepsychiatry and lawscientific evidencerole of a judgemedical evidence
Type
Article
Information
BJPsych Advances , Volume 30 , Special Issue 6: Expert Psychiatric Evidence - including topics from the Grange Medicolegal Conference , November 2024 , pp. 338 - 345
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal College of Psychiatrists

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Footnotes

A version of this article was published in the Irish Judicial Studies Journal 2023; 7(1): 52–69 (https://www.ijsj.ie/editions/2023-edition-1/) under the title ‘The safe use of expert evidence’, which in turn was based on a paper delivered to the 21st Annual Grange Conference in September 2022. This article, while drawing on those sources, was rewritten for mental health professionals.

References

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