The thing I worry about with expert witness testimony is that if you assume a spherical cow then you can make all sorts of logical deduction work in your favour

The thing I worry about with expert witness testimony is that if you assume a spherical cow then you can make all sorts of logical deduction work in your favour. Something feels fundamentally uneasy about an expert bringing of supposedly rigorous scientific facts to only one side of a court argument. Cases that come to a court are based on much fuzzier, human condition concepts like “did they mean to do it?”, “was it in the heat of the moment?”, and “did they know what they were doing was wrong?”. Even more so when it comes to the sentence which is handed down. I think it’s also the same sort of queasiness I feel when I see a paper that states that an exoplanet has butterflies due to the presence of a certain kind of Nitrogen molecule in its atmosphere. The science of the molecule detection is bang on but the inferred conclusion is not.