Today the court and parties questioned expert witness Prof. Faustmann, who had been summoned by Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s \u201cold\u201d defense counsel Heer, Stahl and Sturm to present a \u201ccritique of methodology\u201d of expert witness Prof. Sa\u00df.<\/p>\n
The central critique presented by Faustmann turned out to be one aspect of Sa\u00df\u2019 expert statement which is quite genial in its modesty: Sa\u00df stressed that psychiatry is not a natural science and that forensic psychiatry, a science tasked with presenting prognoses in individual cases, can never be free of subjective assessments and the influence of the individual knowledge of the expert witness. According to Sa\u00df, therefore, one main quality criterion for forensic psychiatric expert opinions is that they present the material in an accessible manner and that the reader \u2013 in this case the court \u2013 is able to follow and reconstruct the expert\u2019s arguments.<\/p>\n
Faustmann, on the other hand, argues for a scientific objectivization and \u201coperationalization\u201d of methods employed \u2013 without, however, being able to show that this would lead to much improvement and not simply to a pseudo-scientific reasoning based on simply marking check-lists. In contrast thereto, Sa\u00df\u2019 honesty concerning the limits of psychiatry is rather refreshing.<\/p>\n
Faustmann also failed to note where his personal views put him squarely in the minority among German-speaking psychiatrists: inter alia, he believes that psychiatrists should not present forensic prognoses for persons not suffering from a mental illness, as such cases should instead be examined by psychologists. The opposing view is held not only by German courts, who routinely appoint psychiatrists as experts in such cases, but also by the vast majority of German psychiatrists.<\/p>\n
Some of Faustmann\u2019s comments also seemed rather nitpicky, such as when he gave lengthy comments on certain methods which Sa\u00df had referred to in in his opinion, but had not in fact applied.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, however, Faustmann also did not agree with defense counsel Stahl who had asked him to confirm that Sa\u00df\u2019 expert opinion could not be relied upon by the court \u2013 that, he felt, was for the court to decide, aided in that decision by his critique of methodology.<\/p>\n
Altogether, these is no reason to believe that Faustmann\u2019s critique will raise any doubts in the minds of the judges as to the validity of Sa\u00df\u2019 expert opinion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Questions for defense expert Prof. Faustmann Today the court and parties questioned expert witness Prof. Faustmann, who had been summoned by Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s \u201cold\u201d defense counsel Heer, Stahl and Sturm to present a \u201ccritique of methodology\u201d of expert witness Prof. Sa\u00df. The central critique presented by Faustmann turned out to be one aspect of Sa\u00df\u2019 expert […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1411,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410\/revisions\/1411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}