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Comment by pyb | Hacker News Reader

"The expert witness circuit is surely tempting for many academics, since a distinguished expert can get paid $600+ an hour to prepare a weighty report that supports a lawyer’s case. I don’t have any issue with that, but testifying in court as an expert should be as much a part of your permanent public record as the journal papers you publish. In many cases, the consequences are significant. There should be a danger to your reputation if you are imprudent."

So basically he's kind of threatening the expert witness now?

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I don't see where you get that he's threatening the expert witness. He obviously thinks that the expert witness knowingly presented "evidence" that they should know is bogus and is intended to sway the layman jurors who don't know any better. He thinks there should be consequences for such behavior.

I think he is saying if someone skilled and knowledgeable in the area of the expert witness' testimony shines a light of truth on such testimony it must stand up to the scrutiny. If it does not then you are not being true to your knowledge and are being misleading on purpose to get paid. He argues all such testimony, good or bad, must be a part of your public record so we have that opportunity to examine your body of work. This seems reasonable when your work has the potential to deeply impact groups of individuals or the public.

If the "expert witness" is either lying (in court) or incompetent, shouldn't there be consequences to their professional reputation? Or do you think such things should be consequence-free?

There is already a consequence to lying as a witness, it's called perjury prosecution.

It's unfortunately infrequently pursued when the perjury occurs in a civil case, but if you want to agitate for consequences, agitate for prosecutors willing to enforce the law.

(Or for a civil cause of action for perjury, but that would have to be carefully crafted to prevent an infinite regress of lawsuits.)

That is John's point, though, that you don't have to lie. You can use non-scientific abstraction and obfuscation to testify any way you want. Sort of the post-modern interpretation theory where anything is true, as long as your truth is told more charismatically. This seems pretty obviously true to me.

It probably isn't even perjury. Even the law has some room for interpretation. That is the whole point of case history. Technology is so new and fluid that the legal system may never catch up to or well define the things a crafty obfuscator (expert witness or lawyer) can sling out.

Skilled practitioners in the area of science or engineering will immediately identify the obfuscation and unreality of it, but that does not make it perjury, which does have a much more specific and well defined case law meaning.

> There is already a consequence to lying as a witness, it's called perjury prosecution.

Except that this is an "expert witness", and not a regular witness. The expert witness offers his/her opinions.

A statement about one's own opinion can be materially false, and provably (in the sense the word applies in the legal system) so.

Certainly, an attorney can (and this is true of any witness, not just expert witness) coordinate with a witness on a line of questioning which carefully avoids any questions where perjury would be necessary to avoid damaging the case. That's why we have witnesses subject to examinstion by opposing counsel, as well.

What are the actual requirements for a perjury conviction in the USA? Does the witness have to be intentionally lying? Presumably you don't prosecute someone for being mistaken, misguided or over-confident in their own abilities?

It doesn't sound like Carmack was accusing the witness of lying, but rather they they believed a bit too much in their own pet theory about how to detect copying in code.

I don't usually like to comment on trials, but I think perhaps he has a point here. If there were a reliable method for detecting 'non-literal copying' of code, then the person who made it should be making a killing by selling refactoring tools.

Perjury is already a crime. What further consequences are warranted?

If no-one can call out the bad behavior, that consequence is blocked off. A seal on the testemony blocks review/scrutiny.

John makes a good point. Here, transparency appears to be in truth's best interest.

From the downvotes, sounds like I'm the only one who is shocked by this.

Could you explain why you think this is a threat aimed at the expert witness in this trial?

Any time someone publishes a work, they are putting their reputation at risk. If the work is bad, the whole world will know they did it. Carmack is saying he thinks this should be the case for reports and analyses given by expert witnesses.

You could say the same thing about anything people do in secret. Yet many people still want privacy.

> You could say the same thing about anything people do in secret.

I don't think that makes sense. There is no attempt to generalize this to things people do in secret. There is no claim that if something could risk your reputation then it follows that it should be made public.

Carmack's assertion is only that this particular work (for which the witness does voluntarily and is paid for) should be made public so that these witnesses use the same level of rigor they would for their other published work. And letting the public review it would have benefits too. (I am not agreeing or disagreeing with this.)

Ultimately, if we take Carmack's statements as true, it sounds to me like Facebook/Occulus' defense did not do an adequate job of instilling doubt in the report. He wrote that the defense did a technical tear down. I think if I was a juror, I would need to see this report completely destroyed. I'd need to see the same methodology applied to works where we know there was no copying and have it find false positives.

The assertion is based on the idea that this thing you did is a reflection on who you are, so people who interact with you have a right to know about it so they can judge you by it.

I agree that in this specific instance, it was the job of Oculus' legal team to discredit the report in front of the court. Publishing it after the fact for review by the public doesn't make sense, and calling for it is petty.

> Publishing it after the fact for review by > the public doesn't make sense, and calling for it is > petty.

Carmack isn't calling for it to be published. He only said he thinks the system should work that way.

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He's only threatening them in the sense of peer review. If you publish dumb stuff, your reputation is hurt, but that doesn't make peer review shocking.

You are reading something into the statement that nobody else can see. That's why you are getting downvotes.

It doesn't sound like a threat to me. He's basically saying there should be reputation consequences for being a dishonest expert witness.

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