Wednesday, October 01, 2003

The Strange Case of Saami Shaibani

Court TV and the Raleigh News & Observer both have stories on the disqualification of Saami Shaibani, a physicist and prosecution expert in the highly publicized Peterson murder trial pending in Durham.

The state had offered Shaibani's testimony to show that Kathleen Peterson could not have suffered her fatal injuries in a fall down the stairs, as her husband, the defendant, claims. The bases for Shaibani's opinion included tests in which volunteers were asked to fall down stairwells. But that methodological oddity is not the reason that Shaibani's testimony came to grief. The problem was that Shaibani apparently padded his vitae. Defense counsel produced a letter from officials at Temple University, where Shaibani claimed a research affiliation. Temple disclaimed any current affiliation with Shaibani, and apparently has written similar letters before, when Shaibani -- an inveterate expert witness who seems to have made the dismantling of falling-down-the-stairs defenses something of a specialty -- made similar claims. The judge in the Peterson case concluded that Shaibani had perjured himself about his qualifications, and instructed the jury to disregard his testimony.

Shaibani's links to Temple, it should be noted, were not fabricated from whole cloth. According to the university, he did hold a "courtesy appointment" from 1995 to 1998, though it carried little more than parking privileges. Nor does it appear that any Temple appointment would have been necessary to qualify Shaibani as an expert. He is currently on the faculty at Virginia Tech, and claims to hold advanced degrees from Oxford University. This appears to have been a garden-variety case of truth-stretching, of the sort that might be undertaken by any expert witness with a death wish.

So tell your experts to go over their vitae and make sure they haven't inadvertently embellished. As this parable illustrates, the arcane distinctions between Frye and Daubert matter little, in such circumstances, because judges everywhere frown, uncontroversially, on perjury.
Fed. R. Evid. 702: If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise, if (1) the testimony is based upon sufficient facts or data, (2) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods, and (3) the witness has applied the principles and methods reliably to the facts of the case.