Michigan v. Kowalski (Opinion)
Annotate this CaseThe issue before the Supreme Court in this case was whether expert witness testimony regarding interrogation techniques and psychological factors claimed to generate false confessions was admissible under MRE 702 and MRE 403 and whether exclusion of this testimony violated the Sixth Amendment right to present a defense. The circuit court excluded the testimony of two experts regarding the occurrence of false confessions and the police interrogation techniques likely to generate them as well as the psychological characteristics of defendant that allegedly made him more susceptible to these techniques. Upon review of the trial court record, the Supreme Court held that the circuit court did not abuse its discretion by excluding the expert testimony regarding the published literature on false confessions and police interrogations on the basis of its determination that the testimony was not reliable, even though the subject of the proposed testimony was beyond the common knowledge of the average juror. The Court also held that the circuit court abused its discretion by excluding the proffered testimony regarding defendant's psychological characteristics because it failed to consider this evidence separately from the properly excluded general expert testimony and therefore failed to properly apply both MRE 702 and MRE 403 to that evidence. Accordingly, the Court remanded this case to the circuit court for it to determine whether evidence of defendant's psychological characteristics was sufficiently reliable for admissibility under MRE 702. Furthermore, the Court held that the circuit court's application of MRE 702 did not violate defendant's constitutional right to present a defense.
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