The costs of maintaining the expert witness system

Ostaszewski, Paweł; Joński, Kamil

The costs of maintaining the expert witness system

Abstract

The lack of a uniform mechanism for finding, classifying and appointing expert witnesses seems to be one of the main problems relating to the expert witness system. As a consequence, the workload and the qualifications of individual specialists vary a lot. It is also for the very reason that the bodies requesting expert opinions have very limited knowledge as to when they can expect an expert opinion, and of what quality it will be. Other problems that are signalled in that respect include: excessively long proceedings due to the long waiting time for expert opinions, high costs of the entire expert witness system for the State Treasury and cases in which it is necessary to appoint other expert witnesses due to defects in previously issued expert opinions. It was possible to show some of those issues in the light of the data obtained during the research. A comparison of the time for preparing expert opinions and their costs in selected categories of cases showed that the results obtained in the course of case-file research and statistical research are highly convergent, which seems to confirm their reliability. The estimation of the structure of budget expenditure for expert witnesses for the entire country and a comparison of those estimates with the data from the budget reports filed by the courts confirms that the information gathered during the research may be used for subsequent work and analysis concerning the expert witness system.