In a criminal law case, are expert witnesses necessary?
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Video Transcription
In many cases it may be in the client’s best interest to get expert witnesses to testify on their behalf if it’s required to go to trial or in some cases, get reports from expert witnesses.
Any kind of evidence from expert witnesses that can be given to the prosecution to show them why their case is not valid… a classic example may be, DNA evidence, where we have to get DNA analyzed to show that they were not really the person that committed the crime. Now, you can do one of two things—you can say, well, we’ll just let the government handle it, I’m sure they’ll be fair—haha. Or you can go get the best people to look at the evidence and bring it to the government’s attention that you have the wrong person, you can either get rid of the case now or we are going to show it to the jury and show them that you had this information and failed to do so.
Now, as to who pays for that, the client pays for that. Just as the client is responsible for my attorney fees, the client must pay for the expert witnesses and the best way to get a result in any kind of case is to get a good attorney and get good expert witnesses to counteract the evidence the prosecution is going to try to bring.
The prosecution is going to bring their witnesses—we need to fight their witnesses with our witnesses. We bring in people that are good, that know what they’re doing—they can show to a jury that our client is not guilty of what they’ve been charged with, but more importantly…by getting that information earlier in the process, we can get it to the district attorney’s office, the US attorney’s office and give the government a chance to do the right thing, which is get rid of the case so our client does not have to go to trial and face a possible loss of liberty due to an unfair prosecution with invalid evidence.
