Ekspertizės akto analizės ir vertinimo ypatumai civilinėje teisenoje

Abstract

This article covers the main topical aspects of law expertise evaluation taken into consideration special knowledge and concepts of law expertise.
Expert’s findings and evaluation in court are the core stages in judicial proceeding when finding proof significance is reviewed and evaluated. Evaluation of expert’s findings is performed following general rules of the Civil process code. Core elements of the proceedings: direct understanding of evidentiary information, verbal trial at the time of judicial proceeding.
Writing this article and giving tests we discovered that 72 per cent of the questioned people don’t understand expert’s findings because of lack of knowledge.
Correct determination of court subjective and objective factors evaluating expert’s findings is one of the main guarantees the truth in the case will be disclosed.
Court proceedings evaluating expert’s findings have two levels:
1. Evaluation of findings’ structure and content according to juridical, gnoseologic and ethic criteria;
2. Comparison of expert’s findings with another evidence of the case and determination if findings coincide with other evidence.
Scientific legitimate evaluation of expert’s findings is part of findings’ reliability evaluation.
Scientific legitimate analyses of expert’s findings are the most complicated moment of expert’s findings evaluation. This analysis is complicated because the expert’s findings are the result of inquiry performed by a professional on the bases of special knowledge. The court having no special knowledge has to correctly evaluate scientific expert’s findings justification.
Analyzing expert’s scientific justification the court has to analyze:
a) if this inspection has scientific presumption;
b) if expert’s findings are based on scientific data and expert’s special knowledge;
c) if expert’s findings coincide with investigation of the case, if the data and results of the investigation are logically bound;
d) if the expert used the most effective methods and if they meet the requirements of modern science and technology;
e) if the material the findings were made had been studied well enough;
f) if the expert correctly studied and evaluated the investigated object’s evidence and characteristics.
Courts’ possibility to consider inspection act from a factual aspect is explained by the fact that law describes requirements for both: form and content of expert’s findings. As it was mentioned before inspection act has to be submitted in a written form. It should consist of three parts: introduction, investigation and final (expert’s findings).
Practice shows that expert’s findings usually state he couldn’t find answers to given questions in two cases: first, when given question is not of expert’s special knowledge field, second, when the material provided to the expert is not enough to give peremptory and correct conclusion.
Analyzing investigation part of the act the Court has to find out if court investigation received enough material, if the material was good enough to perform judicial inspection and give conclusion, if the trial was performed well enough, if the expert used the most effective methods which are based on modern science and technologies, if there is evidence in the subject’s case to make conclusions and if the expert evaluated them correctly, if the expert’s findings coincide the trial, if there are no contradictions between investigation part of the act and the expert’s conclusions.
Comparing the introductory and investigation part of the inspection act with expert’s findings the Court has to determine if expert answered all questions, if the answers to the questions were thorough, well-defined and trusted, if expert’s findings are based on science.
In practice some courts evaluating expert’s findings pay attention only to expert’s findings by ignoring the investigative part. Such evaluation of expert’s findings is forbidden. Such evaluation doesn’t evaluate scientific base of expert’s findings and methods while using special investigations.
In this way the court evaluating expert’s findings not only can but must analyze all elements of expert’s findings, review its justification and the scientific evidence of the methods.