Last month, the Washington Supreme Court decided a public and private nuisance case against a local utility for fear of future illnesses from exposure to electro-magnetic frequency radiation (EMF). Lakey v. Puget Sound Energy, Inc., ___ Wn. 2d ___ , 2013 WL 865468 (Mar. 6, 2013).
The defendant utility and local municipality had moved for the exclusion of plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, under Frye v. United States, 54 App. D.C. 46, 293 F. 1013 (1923), and the Washington state version of Rule 702. The plaintiff homeowners submitted declarations from two expert witnesses, Dr. De Kun Li and and Dr. David Carpenter.
Dr. Carpenter was the Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany and a Professor of Environmental Health Sciences within the School of Public Health. He also has held the position of Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Albany and the Director of the Wadsworth Center for Laboratories and Research of the New York State Department of Health. Dr. Carpenter apparently has been active in testifying about EMF health issues. See, e.g., Amended Declaration of David Carpenter (2011).
The trial court conducted a three-day Frye hearing, at which both sides offered expert witness testimony. Plaintiffs called Carpenter, and the defendants called Dr. Nancy Lee, an epidemiologist, and Dr. Mark Israel, a professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, and a specialist in the molecular and cellular biology of brain tumors.
At the hearing, Dr. Lee testified that Carpenter had failed to follow generally accepted epidemiologic methodology of considering all pertinent data. Carpenter had “cherry picked”; his opinion selectively ignored studies that contradicted his conclusions. Even among the studies that Carpenter had relied upon, he ignored data that undermined or contradicted his conclusion. Slip op. at 6. Furthermore, Carpenter ignored the toxicologic data and studies available. Id. Among the studies ignored by Carpenter were the most recent, and most carefully conducted, studies. Id. The trial court excluded Li and Carpenter, and the plaintiffs appealed.
Affirming the exclusion, the Supreme Court of Washington engaged in a curious two step. The Court reversed the trial court’s exclusion on Frye grounds. In Supreme Court’s view, the plaintiffs’ witnesses sufficiently deployed a generally accepted method when they waded into the field of epidemiology because epidemiology is generally accepted. The Frye doctrine does not require that expert witnesses apply the established methodology well, reliably, or soundly. The expert witnesses are immunized from exclusion by relying upon studies from a generally accepted discipline, no matter how poorly or selectively they have analyzed and interpreted these studies. An expert witness’s errors in engaging with a particular scientific discipline that is in general considered generally accepted “go to the weight, not the admissibility, of the evidence unless the error renders the evidence unreliable.” Slip op. at 11.
Carpenter’s cherry-picking approach to data and studies, however, was properly excluded under Rule 702. Carpenter’s approach vitiated the reliability of his opinion with the consequence of :
“seriously tainting his conclusions because epidemiology is an iterative science relying on later studies to refine earlier studies in order to reach better and more accurate conclusions. Carpenter refused to account for the data from the toxicological studies, which epidemiological methodology requires unless the evidence for the link between exposure and disease is unequivocal and strong, which is not the case here. Carpenter also selectively sampled data within one of the studies he used, taking data indicating an EMF-illness link and ignoring the larger pool of data within the study that showed no such link, Carpenter’s treatment of this data created an improper false impression about what the study actually showed.”
Slip op. at 12.
So that’s the difference between Frye and Rule 702!
