Drawing on the responses provided by a survey of state court judges (N = 400), empirical evidence is presented with respect to judges’ opinions about the Daubert criteria, their utility as decision-making guidelines, the level to which judges understand their scientific meaning, and how they might apply them when evaluating the admissibility of expert evidence. Proportionate stratified random sampling was used to obtain a representative sample of state court judges. Part I of the survey was a structured telephone interview (response rate of 71%) and in Part II, respondents had an option of completing the survey by telephone or receiving a questionnaire in the mail (response rate of 81%). Survey results demonstrate that judges overwhelmingly support the “gatekeeping” role as defined by Daubert, irrespective of the admissibility standard followed in their state. However, many of the judges surveyed lacked the scientific literacy seemingly necessitated by Daubert. Judges had the most difficulty operationalizing falsifiability and error rate, with only 5% of the respondents demonstrating a clear understanding of falsifiability and only 4% demonstrating a clear understanding of error rate. Although there was little consensus about the relative importance of the guidelines, judges attributed more weight to general acceptance as an admissibility criterion. Although most judges agreed that a distinction could be made between “scientific” and “technical or otherwise specialized” knowledge, the ability to apply the Daubert guidelines appeared to have little bearing on whether specific types of expert evidence were designated as “science” or “nonscience.” Moreover, judges’ “bench philosophy of science” seemed to reflect the rhetoric, rather than the substance, of Daubert. Implications of these results for the evolving relationship between science and law and the ongoing debates about Frye, Daubert, Joiner, and Kumho are discussed.

The authors present previously unreported results from a nationwide survey (N ϭ 325) of state trial judges (S. I. Gatowski et al., 2001) that was conducted pre-Kumho. The authors report how the 1993 Daubert guidelines were applied to psychological syndrome and profile evidence, and the impact of the decision on the admissibility of such evidence. They found that judges' views of and experience with psychological testimony varied widely and that most judges neither understood nor applied the more technical Daubert guidelines, such as falsifiability and error rate, when assessing psychological evidence. Overall, the findings suggest that Daubert's impact on the admissibility of psychological syndrome and profile testimony is negligible and that most judges are more comfortable with pre-Daubert standards when this type of testimony is proffered.Psychological testimony has been controversial since initial efforts to offer such opinions in court (Smith, 1989;Yuille, 1989) and has become even more problematic with the dramatic increase in the use of such testimony (Faust & Ziskin, 1988). The use of psychological syndromes and profiles in courtroom testimony has been problematic for decades, as indicated by a

Content analysis of 192 U.S. District Court cases was conducted to investigate judges' evaluations of expert characteristics and evidence characteristics for toxicology, psychological/psychiatric, and damages testimony. Judges evaluated more expert characteristics, but not more evidence characteristics, as the number of months post-Daubert increased (Hypotheses 1 and 2). More evidence characteristics were evaluated when evidence was quantitatively rather than qualitatively based (Hypothesis 3). The greatest number of evidence characteristics examined was for toxicology evidence (Hypothesis 4). Fewer expert characteristics were evaluated for admissible evidence, but more evidence characteristics were evaluated for inadmissible evidence (Hypothesis 5). All analyses were significant at .05. Implications for judges, attorneys, and experts are discussed.

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