Child abuse pediatrics is a specialty devoted to the issues involved in alleged child abuse. Expert witnesses in this specialty may report and testify regarding non-accidental trauma, shaken baby syndrome, fatal neglect, as well as other criminal cases involving injured infants and children. To better understand how medical experts define reasonable medical certainty in the context of these cases, Dr. Mark S. Dias, Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics, along with investigators at Penn State Hershey Medical Center and Penn State Dickinson School of Law, surveyed medical specialists who testify in cases of suspected abusive head trauma. The results are described in The Penn State Journal Child Abuse and Neglect article, Better definition needed for reasonable medical certainty in child abuse cases.
Physicians use different definitions of “reasonable medical certainty” when testifying as expert witnesses in child abuse cases. The variability is troubling because it could result in flawed rulings, according to researchers at Penn State College of Medicine.
In court cases involving alleged child abuse, expert medical witnesses are asked to testify if abuse has occurred and when. Attorneys commonly ask expert witnesses to express their opinions in terms of reasonable medical certainty. However, there is no clear legal definition for the term.
In many cases, the threshold of probability that constitutes reasonable medical certainty is left to the discretion of the experts. And despite the court’s reliance on this opinion in reaching a verdict, experts are seldom asked to share this probability with the court during their testimony.
Other investigators on this project were Susan Boehmer, Department of Public Health Sciences, Penn State College of Medicine; Lucy Johnston-Walsh, Penn State Dickinson School of Law; and Dr. Benjamin H. Levi, Department of Pediatrics, Penn State Hershey Medical Center and Department of Humanities, Penn State College of Medicine. Read more at EurekAlert.org.
