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Comment by denzil_correa | Hacker News Reader

Is it time to have special judges/jury who understand the technical details of such cases? I can't seem to even think as to how a judge/jury with no technical expertise would understand the fine print of the details being given out by the lawyers.

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It's interesting to parallel to medical cases. Ordinarily, a jury uses their own judgment to decide if someone was negligent measured against ordinary standards of care. But in a medical malpractice case, they decide instead whether someone failed to adhere to accepted medical practice. That gives the medical community a lot of power, because they get to set the standard of practice, and testimony about a specific doctor's actions is always filtered through a medical expert witness.

To date, engineers have not been given similar consideration, probably because they're not independent and their employers would force them to abuse the privilege. E.g. automotive engineers would say "oh, it's totally acceptable to have that exploding gas tank" and software engineers would say "oh, it's totally okay for that to lose all your data."

Barring special consideration like that, it comes down to the expert witnesses. The jury will decide based on which expert they find more credible / whose lawyers do the best job of presenting their expert.

I think expert witnesses serve that purpose. There have been complicated technical details in jury trials before the internet and this seems to be an adequate way to solve the problem.

The problem with expert witnesses is that the skill required to tell which expert is more credible is the same skill that each expert claims to represent best. And then you have the outright liars who have made their careers being expert liars in court, like Dr. Michael West, who are not backed up by the medical community, but by prosecutors.

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