Ride the Lightning

WHEN LOGIC AND PROPORTION HAVE FALLEN SLOPPY DEAD: JUDGE REFUSES TO QUALIFY CERTIFIED FORENSIC EXAMINER BECAUSE HE HAS A BIOCHEMISTRY DEGREE

January 30, 2008

If you go into enough courtrooms, you’ll see it all. You’ll watch an irate judge order a bailiff to bring him an attorney’s ringing cell phone and throw it out the courtroom window. You see a judge fall sound asleep while hapless attorneys try to carry on. You’ll see a dimwitted attorney who somehow got a gun through security cause a near riot when he pulls it out of his briefcase, in a misguided attempt to introduce it into evidence (just before the bailiffs wrestle him to the floor). You’ll see an attorney have the temerity and stupidity to tell a judge that she is a few French fries short of a happy meal.

The courtroom can be a crazy place. Alice really is six feet tall and things in Wonderland sometimes have very little rationality.

So with that as a backdrop . . . one of our forensic examiners went to testify as an expert in a routine case this week (somewhere here in Virginia, though prudence keeps me from naming the judge or the court). He is a certified forensic examiner, holding the CCE, and he has previously qualified as an expert. He has also spent several years doing nothing but computer forensics, and served as the Director of Computer Forensics at another company. The opposing counsel argued vigorously that, in spite of the examiner’s background and previous qualifiations, he should not be admitted as an expert because he had an undergraduate degree in biochemistry. Remarkably enough, the judge sustained that objection.

You might think this is from the theater of the absurd, but alas, it is just another day in court, where the truly bizarre is standard fare. Ah, this explains it . . . there’s a hookah smoking caterpillar in the corner    . . .  feed your head . . . feed your head . . .

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