The Expert Witness – Bringing Science into the Legal System

William H. Woodruff

May 7, 2018 at 2:00 P.M. in the Pearl Young Theater
(video within Langley firewall only)

Abstract

The US legal system allows a person with a special knowledge of a particular subject to present opinions to the court without having witnessed any of the events related to the case. These “expert witnesses” play a vital role by helping the courts make sense of specialized or complicated information such as a DNA test result. This role is unique among courtroom witnesses; others are only allowed to talk about their firsthand experience, i.e. what they saw or heard.
Consider that there were 7,000,000 motor vehicle accidents resulting in 2,000,000 injuries and 34,000 deaths in 2016. The courts are tasked with sorting out criminal and civil matters arising from vehicle accidents ranging from murder to the dollar value of pain and suffering and, consequently, need a detailed understanding of how and why an accident occurred.

This talk will describe how vehicle accidents are analyzed. Working with evidence, witness testimony, experimental data, and physics, engineers reconstruct the events immediately surrounding an accident. Several case studies will be presented to show how this work is approached and the thorny issue of its value. While there is obvious value in presenting DNA evidence to convict or exonerate someone accused of murder, the value of civil litigation and expert testimony is often less clear.

Speaker

William Woodruff has over 20 years of experience in the areas of automobile, heavy truck, and bus accident investigation. He also specializes in automotive technology, vehicle testing, and consumer product failure analysis. He is a founding partner of InSciTech Inc., an engineering consulting firm, and was formerly employed by Failure Analysis Associates. He is an Aerospace Engineer by training with undergraduate and graduate degrees in Aerospace Engineering, including a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. How he ended up investigating automobile accidents will also be discussed.