A friend of mine was facing a mountain of criminal charges. Photo evidence proved the cops lied. We needed an expert testimony explaining the camera angle and why the photo explained how the cops lied.
I think we called every service qualified for providing such a testimony in Ontario, and a good portion of them across all of Canada. Some were even happy to work with us, until they found out we were testifying against the police. We ended up going international but without luck, and ended up with no expert testimony
This is absolutely horrible to hear!! I know you probably don't want homework, but would you ever consider taking this story to news outlets? I suspect there'd be no compensation, but the uproar might (eventually) result in change.
And overturning convictions gets you straight into the history books. It gets so ridiculous that people make their life work out of redoing cases from the 90s.
The problem is that these intersecting conditions make the number of relevant cases small, while having experts testify for defendants for cheap during mundane cases has MUCH higher demand.
1) Pile of evidence that someone is guilty.
2) Federal "expert witness" allowed and funded to testify it points to X person
3) Defense is broke
4) If defense not broke, judge finds reason why defense expert witness can't present their full argument
5) Prosecution offers plea deal or a gazillion years in jail
6) Person folds when they realize none of their defense is allowed or will be funded, or goes to trial and gets a gazillion years for daring to go to trial.
If you already have a pile of evidence for a crime and an expert witnesses you can keep piling on it's not much of a stretch to dump it on some random person, as we saw here, quite easy actually.
Even your paid defense attorney might never look at the case files at all. Jared from Subway's lawyer got into hot water because he got Jared to take a plea and it turned out he was factually innocent of one of the many offenses he was charged with, and that fact would have been uncovered quickly had the defense attorney ever looked at the evidence, which he said he had not.
Most plea bargains are done simply based on the charging instruments.
This is effectively a truth, but prosecutors are generally held to high ethical standards, where they are expected to drop cases / not bring cases if the evidence doesn't point specifically to the defendant.
That said, there are occasionally times when prosecutors have been caught hiding / burying / not sharing exculpatory evidence (something the police / prosecution found which would help the defense's case against the prosecution). The only reason to do so would be to sandbag the case against the defendant even when there is a shadow of a doubt in the prosecution's case.
Could the solution be to turn lots of local IT / programmers into potential experts to bend down the cost curve?
I was actually dismissed from a jury panel partially because I said I don't know if I could trust the experts because my perception is that individual experts either repeatedly testify for only the prosecution or only the defense.
Some corners must be cut, to reach quotas!
But I also suspect your statistic is not accurate and designed to make your point, not represent reality.