The lawyers and character witnesses might not be the only biased ones in the courtroom, according to research by Assoc. Psychiatry Prof. Dr. Daniel Murrie, who worked alongside a colleague at Sam Houston State University to gauge the objectivity of expert testimony.
After studying sex offender trials in Texas, Murrie became interested in investigating whether expert witnesses were biased toward their side of the case — that is, would experts hired by the prosecution produce assessments more favorable to the prosecution’s case, and the same with those hired by the defense.
Murrie particularly researched how these biases played out with it came to risk-assessment profiles for perpetrators of sexual violence, where psychologists estimate the likelihood that an attacker will commit similar crimes in the future. Rather than use information from actual court cases — where other variables could explain much of the potential biases, Murrie instead chose to conduct a rigorous experiment.
Starting in 2010 with funding from the National Science Foundation, Murrie and his team recruited 118 psychiatrists and psychologists from several states. In exchange for a workshop on evaluating sexual predators, the psychologists agreed to consult on several cases of sexual violence: some for the prosecution and others for the defense.
“Those experts who believed they were working for the prosecution, tended to see the same offenders as higher risk, more likely to re-offend” Murrie said. “The experts who believed they were working for the defense scored those same experts as less likely to re-offend.”
Scores differed by much more than typical error rates, Murrie said.
Although the correlation was surprisingly strong, this pattern has been shown in prior experiments. Some in the field dispute the results, and claim that experts aren’t really biased but rather attorneys seek out experts with unusual opinions, but Murrie’s experiment suggests a more systemic level of bias exists.
“Most of our field has been very pleased to see this problem carefully studied and documented, so the reaction has been surprisingly positive,” Murrie said. “That said, everyone thinks the problem [of bias] is with someone else, not them.”
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