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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

> My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case.

Is this not the exact reason for expert witnesses?

Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial, like the court system itself. There is no "neutral" evaluation of the reliability of a piece of evidence. If one side hires an expert to evaluate something, they are under no obligation to have the expert testify in court if the evaluation doesn't help their case.

> Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial

In the UK, expert witnesses are "servants of the court". Sure, they're paid by one side or the other; but they're witnesses, and they're required to give true, unbiased testimony, on pain of a perjury charge. Is it not the same inthe USA?

The gulf between truish, biased testimony and perjury is immense. The entire reason to have an expert witness giving testimony is that no one else in the courtroom is fully qualified to determine the truthfulness of the testimony.

Expert witnesses can be cripplingly expensive. Having a gratis sanity check sounds like a great idea, assuming you can find some way to insulate them from influence.

Can confirm. I worked at a small statistics consultancy where the owner did some expert testimony, and you have to reveal what you charge. The opposing side was often paying 500+/hr for shoddy work!

I think we've seen stories of Ivy League professors charging thousands per hour, and making the bulk of their income this way. Not sure how high it goes in the most high-profile cases.

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