Cook County Public Defenders Blog

Walter Allen’s conviction for attempt murder and 43 year prison sentence was reversed in a scholarly opinion by Justice Wolfson because he found the trial court “failed to conduct a meaningful inquiry” into the Allen’s proposed testimony by an expert in the field of eye witness identification prior to barring the testimony. Justice Wolfson writes that the trial court’s ”conclusion that the proposed {expert} testimony would confuse the jury had no considered basis.”  This opinion is a must read for anyone with an identification case or even a case in which you are trying to call an expert witness in a field that is not regularly accepted in Illinois courts.  People v. Walter Allen, 2007 Ill App LEXIS 1054 (9/28/2007) .

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under Hot Legal Topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.