High court gives wide berth to trial courts deciding scientific evidence.

To plaintiff lawyers who found the U.S. Supreme Court's 1993 Daubert ruling unappetizing, the recent Joiner decision will surely leave a foul aftertaste.

In December, the High Court used General Electric Co. v. Joiner to emphasize the trial court's powerful gatekeeper role in deciding whether jurors may hear scientific expert testimony in products liability, medical negligence, and other consumer oriented cases. (No. 96-188, 1997 U.S. Lexis 7503 (Dec. 15, 1997).)

Specifically, the justices ruled that appellate courts are to give deference to the evidence admissibility decisions of the lower courts unless those courts have clearly abused their discretion.

"Because scientific evidence is often essential to a vindication of legal rights, a trial judge who erroneously rules such testimony inadmissible does not simply exclude a piece of evidence," said ATLA President Richard Hailey. "This is frequently the death knell of a plaintiffs cause of action."

ATLA leaders viewed the Joiner ruling as one that imposes additional requirements on parties who rely on scientific evidence at trial.

"Trial judges can be expected to require not only scientific studies supporting the testimony of experts, but also a detailed explanation of how the experts arrived at their conclusions in a scientifically valid manner," Hailey said.

In Joiner, a Georgia municipal worker claimed his exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, had "promoted" his lung cancer. A federal trial judge rejected his attempt to bolster this assertion with studies based on epidemiological and animal research. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, noting that the Federal Rules of Evidence say judges should lean toward admitting such expert testimony. The Eleventh Circuit also said that appeals courts should apply "a particularly stringent standard of review."

On appeal, the Supreme Court countered that a district court's decision on scientific evidence admissibility generally should be upheld unless that court clearly abused its discretion.

Writing for the Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said the scientific studies presented in the district court litigation "were so dissimilar to the facts [in Joiner's case] that it was not an abuse of discretion for the district court to have rejected the experts' reliance on them." He added that a judge "may conclude that there is simply too great an analytical gap between the data and the opinion proffered."

The decision concerned trial lawyers who contend that jurors, not judges , should decide the credibility of scientific evidence. The plaintiff bar argued that federal appellate courts have the authority to closely scrutinize lower court decisions rather than follow a court mandate that they defer to the lower court.

The Supreme Court's ruling comes just four years after Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (509 U.S. 579 (1993)) in which the High Court established the "gatekeeper" role for trial judges regarding scientific evidence admissibility. Joiner attempts to clarify how much latitude appellate courts have to overrule trial court decisions.