THE WEIGHT VERSUS ADMISSIBILITY DILEMMA - DAUBERTS APPLICABILITY TO AMETHOD OR PROCEDURE IN A PARTICULAR CASE

Scientific evidence, increasingly commonplace in today's society, prov ides unique difficulties for the court, particularly with regard to ad missibility. Because scientific evidence may make or break a case, the danger associated with introduction invalid evidence is great. In Dau bert, the Supreme Court established a standard for the admissibility o f scientific evidence based on reliability and relevance, rejecting th e long-standing general acceptance test of Frye.However, the Daubert d ecision did not specifically state whether evidence regarding how a sp ecific experiment or method was carried out in a particular case was r elevant in determining the admissibility of the evidence or only the w eight of the evidence. As a result, courts disagree as to the applicab ility of the Daubert standard regarding how a specific experiment or a nalysis was carried out. Should evidence of the use of a flawed proced ure exclude the scientific testimony or merely discredit it? Courts wh ich delegate the analysis of a particular application to the finder of fact, as a question of weight for the jury, cite expediency or allevi ating the judge's load and confidence in the adversarial system. Court s which place the analysis in the hands of the judge as a gatekeeper c ite the reliability of scientific evidence. This note proposes a compr omise to the weight-of-the-evidence and admissibility approaches. The author suggests an affidavit provided by the expert which requires a s howing of scientific integrity to assist the gatekeeper in the admissi bility decision.