Recently in Evidence Category

Congress recently added Rule 502 to the Federal Rules of Evidence in Senate Bill 2450 (Leahy, Graham, Specter), enacted as Pub. L. 100-322, Sept. 19, 2008, 122 Stat. 3537. Senate Report 110-264 is available on the Senate Judiciary Committee site. I haven't had a chance to examine this yet but wanted to bring it to our readers' attention for those who may have this issue in pending cases. (Hat tip: Ward.)

Adam Liptak at the NYT compares expert testimony in the U.S. with other countries. Particularly interesting is the Australian "hot tub" system.

In that procedure, also called concurrent evidence, experts are still chosen by the parties, but they testify together at trial — discussing the case, asking each other questions, responding to inquiries from the judge and the lawyers, finding common ground and sharpening the open issues....

Australian judges have embraced hot tubbing. “You can feel the release of the tension which normally infects the evidence-gathering process,” Justice Peter McClellan of the Land and Environmental Court of New South Wales said in a speech on the practice. “Not confined to answering the question of the advocates,” he added, experts “are able to more effectively respond to the views of the other expert or experts.”

It's an interesting concept, but I'm not sure it would resolve the main problem:

Sequential lineups have been touted as inherently superior to simultaneous lineups. A new study indicates that the situation is not quite that simple. (Hat tip: Psychology and Crime News) The article is:
Lineup composition, suspect position, and the sequential lineup advantage.
Carlson, Curt A.; Gronlund, Scott D.; Clark, Steven E.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. 2008 Jun Vol 14(2) 118-128

Abstract after the jump:

The latest issue of Law & Human Behavior has an article by psychologist Steven J. Rubenzer titled The Standardized Field Sobriety Tests: A Review of Scientific and Legal Issues (subscription required):

This article details the history and development of the National Highway and Safety Administration’s Standardized Field Sobriety Tests. They are reviewed in terms of relevant scientific, psychometric, and legal issues. It is concluded that the research that supports their use is limited, important confounding variables have not been thoroughly studied, reliability is mediocre, and that their developers and prosecution-oriented publications have oversold the tests. Further, case law since their development has severed the tests from their validation data, so that they are not admissible on the criterion for which they were validated (blood alcohol concentration), and admissible for a criterion for which they were not (mental, physical, or driving impairment). Directions for further research are presented.

Time constraints prevent me from a thorough reading, but a cursory read provides this assertion, that if true, sounds troublesome:

This review of the SFST [Standardized Field Sobriety Tests] empirical research finds many deficiencies and unanswered questions. The SFSTs are not validated as tests of impaired driving or as indicators of loss of normal physical functioning: I could not identify a single study, published or not, that that has ever addressed these issues. There is only one peer-reviewed study that reported moderate correlations of SFST performance with decrements in cognitive performance. The SFSTs do show substantial correlations with BAC in most studies, subject to the limitations cited throughout this paper.

It would be interesting to read an opposing view.