Study: Experts side with employer

Expert testimony in sex-predator-confinement cases is supposed to be objective, but a recent study found a bias toward the side that is paying them.

The authors recruited more than 100 psychologists and psychiatrists from several states and told them they were each helping evaluate a large batch of sex predators when they were actually all reviewing the same four files. Half were then “hired” by someone posing as a defense lawyer and the other half by a prosecutor.

The difference was striking — the same offenders were considered lower risk by those who thought they were working for the defense and higher risk by the state’s experts.

“You’d expect scores to be really identical,” said Daniel Murrie, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and an author of the study, published in August. “There really does seem to be a pull for evaluators to form opinions that favor the side that retained them.”

One reason may be money. Bills can reach close to $100,000 on a single case, and the prospect of future work looms large.

“When you’ve got that kind of financial incentive built into a system, there is a bias toward making the person happy who sends you a paycheck,” said Natalie Novick Brown, a Seattle psychologist and defense expert in Florida. “Not everyone who does evaluations is biased, but from my experience, many people are.”