Logical Reasoning

PT148 · S4 · Q17 When expert witnesses give testimony

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When expert witnesses give testimony, jurors often do not understand the technical information and thereby are in no position to evaluate such testimony.

Statements

Juror often don't understand the technical information involved in expert testimony and thus they're in no position to evaluate it.

Experts from both sides often make conflicting claims, while often seeming to both be competent, making it hard for the jury to assess who is more reliable.

Evaluate

That was a lot of fuzzy claims that add up to a general gist of, 'Darn -- I guess jurors are kind of in a tough position when it comes to expert witness testimony; the witnesses can both seem reliable but say conflicting things, and meanwhile we jurors don't have the technical expertise to know who's right.'

There aren't any conditionals. There are very wishy-washy quantifiers like "often, often, frequently". There's a little bit of causality in the sense of and in the sense of .

Goal

Hard to predict a specific answer here. We should probably just check out answers and look for the most provable claim we can find.

17.

The statements above, if true, most strongly support which one of the following?

  1. There should be limits placed

    Out of Scope: preparing a case

    This paragraph was about the testimony that happens when a court is hearing a case. We could probably support that there should be limits placed on how much technical info can be offered as testimony during a trial, since it puts jurors in an intractable bind. But this is about how much technical info the lawyers on both sides can consider while preparing for trial.

    5% picked this

  2. Correct

    Jury decisions in cases involving

    Why this is right

    This is super provable wording because to prove "X is not always Y" you only need one data point in which X is true and Y is not. Do we think there is at least one case in which a jury's decision, in a case that involved expert witness testimony, was not determined by the reliability of that expert witness testimony? Sure. The last sentence is saying that when expert witnesses make conflicting claims but both seem competent, the jury is "unable to assess the reliability of the expert testimony". If the jury is unable to assess the reliability of the expert testimony, then naturally the decision they make in the case they're deliberating will not be based on how reliable the expert testimony was. If you can't assess / measure / ascertain the reliability, then there's no way that reliability is determining your decision.

    Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    88% picked this

  3. Jurors who understand the technical

    Out of Scope: jurors who understand

    If the paragraph had said, "Jurors who wear a watch understand that one day they will die", could we infer from that that "Jurors who don't wear a watch do not understand that one day they will die"? Of course not. That's what this answer is doing. What we were told was, Jurors who don't understand the technical info are in no position to evaluate such testimony. That doesn't give us license to infer the opposite trait about the opposite group: Jurors who do understand are in a position. We received literally zero information about jurors who understand the technical information. Furthermore, the opposite trait we'd be inferring would be that "these jurors are in a position to evaluate expert testimony", which is not quite the same as "these jurors can accurately assess its legal implications".

    3% picked this

  4. Jury members should generally be

    Too Strong: should / generally

    It's risky to derive a "should" statement from descriptive facts (but on Most Supported it will happen now and then). But this is a very strong leap -- yes, it's a problem that jurors struggle to understand technical info and that they don't have a great way to evaluate competing claims from expert witnesses. However, there's more than one way to address that problem. We don't have any support for the idea that this should be the solution: from now on, we primarily pick jurors based on technical knowledge (think about how impractical it would be to follow through on that plan -- the small segment of the population that has technical expertise would constantly be called for jury duty).

    3% picked this

  5. Expert witnesses who testify on

    Too Strong: likely to agree

    Part of the paragraph seems to go against this, since we hear that experts on opposing sides often make conflicting claims. That sounds as though they are disagreeing in their evaluations of technical claims. Thus, it would be very strong to derive that they usually agree.

    1% picked this

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