There have been many profound cases throughout American history. We will be reviewing two of these cases and the profound impact it had on the American court system. These cases are the cases of Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals and Frye v. U.S. This led the way for how scientific expert testimony is admissible in court.
The first case of the two was the case of Frye v. the U.S. back in 1923. Frye v. U.S. brought into question the use of the lie detector test also known as the systolic blood pressure deception test (Orsdel, Nd). Frye was given a systolic blood pressure deception test which supposedly can detect the difference between the subject lying and the subject’s fear of the test itself.
Frye was subjected to the test prior to trial and the prosecutor tried to bring into evidence the expert testimony of the scientist that ran the test on Frye. The trial judge had a responsibility to Frye to ensure that the expert testimony be applied on if the systolic blood pressure deception test be widely accepted in its field. However the systolic blood pressure deception test had not and is still not widely accepted as scientifically valid in the courts today.
Therefore the systolic blood pressure deception test cannot be used as scientific evidence in the courts. This also means that the operator’s of the systolic blood pressure deception test cannot provide expert testimony to the people of the court either. The systolic blood pressure deception test has a long way and does not seem to be making any progress towards every seeing the inside of a courtroom as scientific evidence in a trial.
Frye v. U.S. made its mark on the American legal system as the case that provided the rest of society grounds to take a lie detector test and not have it are enough scientific evidence to end up in court. This is profound since the systolic blood pressure deception test is still used in America today.
The second case that made a significant impact on the American court system is the case of Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals. The Daubert case was a case that involved two minor children and their parents (Supreme Court). These two families had filed a law suit against the Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals company claiming that their child’s birth defects came from using the drug Bendectin. The drug Bendectin had been shown to cause birth defects in animals, and chemical structure analysis. However Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals and their experts still claimed that human birth defects were never proven even though there is a link to chemical structures and the drug Bendectin. The courts did not allow for Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals expert witnesses to testify on behalf of Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals.
Daubert’s case was the beginning of the end for the Frye’s general acceptance since the adoption of the Rules standard. The main reason that the adoption of the Rules standard took the place of Frye’s general acceptance is that Rule 702 does not state that there is a precondition of general acceptance to allow expert testimony based on scientific evidence (Supreme Court). For this one reason the Frye general acceptance standard was replaced by the Rules standard.
Rule 702 is the single most important rule in the Rules standard serving as a kind of guardian to the other Rules in the Rules standard. Rule 702 places the responsibility of deciding whether or not to allow expert testimony in a trial on the trial judge (Supreme Court). Rule 702 is the determining factor as to what and when expert testimony is allowed in a trial.
Daubert’s case made it so that trial judges focus their attention on the methodology used not the conclusion that comes from the methodology used. “However the 2000 Amendment of Rule 702 states that the trial judge must focus on the methodology as well as the conclusion as they go hand-in-hand” (USLEGAL, INC). This shows that even Daubert’s case had its flaws and these are being addressed as time goes on there will new precedence that take place in the courts and force even more of the Rules standards to be changed in order to accommodate the ever changing needs of the court system.
