Expert Witness and Opinion Evidence; Shaken Baby Syndrome

In any legal proceedings, whether adversarial or inquisitorial, witnesses must be called upon to prove the existence or non-existence of each parties’ assertions. There are two kinds of legal proceeding that can be instituted in a court of law; these are the criminal case which involved the state against an accused person and the civil case which a an individual sues another individual to recover damages, compensation, enforcement, restitution e.tc.

The English court system is adversarial in nature whereby the court takes the role of a moderator and pities the parties against each other so as each can prove their own case. Therefore, each party seeking to be believed will approach the court and give an account of the events that make up the dispute. The court will later on come to a final conclusion on who is liable or if the accused is guilty after considering all the facts, the documents adduced.

The terms Experts witnesses and opinion evidence are intertwined in the sense that opinion evidence is mostly adduced by an expert in a given field such as medicine or engineering. Opinion evidence is a separate, independent and inference that an expert gives so that to help the court to clearly understand the facts of the case, the expert may be an expert by virtue of his training or experience in a given field of study which must exist.

The duty to call for an expert is not fixed to the parties alone, the court has powers to call for such evidence if it considers that the expert will shed more light in so as to help the court come to a just determination of the case.

As a general rule, expert opinion evidence is inadmissible in court; ‘Where a person is called as a witness in any civil proceedings, his opinion on any relevant matter ...

... middle of paper ...

...l and it creates problems whether hard, smooth, sharp etc.

The level and magnitude of injury will also depend on the biological factors such as the soft tissue response, bone response which includes thickness, and if an infant has some previous injury.

This research is important and can be applied in investigation of a crime scenes by experts who then proceed to courts and give opinion evidence basing on the data and inference they have come up with: Just like in the case of Massachusetts v Woodward, whereby Dr. Lois E.H. Smith, M.D., Ph.D., an ophthalmologist observed retinal hemorrhages judging which is a characteristic of SBS.

Since expert opinion in relation to SBS is very important, there is an urgent need for both the physician and biomechanicians to collaborate so that the infant head injuries are evaluated objectively for the purposes of assisting the court.