How do jurors weigh opinions of forensic experts pre-exposed to case information? | Online Jury Research Update
In 2015, the National Commission on Forensic Science (NCFS) affirmed that forensic examiners should draw conclusions solely from the physical evidence and not from any other evidence in the case. A suspect's criminal history, confession or alibi do not involve assessment of the physical evidence, and examiners are urged to be blind to such task-irrelevant information to prevent biasing their conclusions about the evidence. While over 70% of forensic examiners believe they can mitigate any bias from task-irrelevant case information simply by ignoring their expectations (Kukucka et al., 2017), scientific research overwhelming has found that knowledge of task-irrelevant case information