From the people who brought you the twinkie defense; the rise of the expert witness industry

Washington Monthly, June, 1987 by Blake Fleetwood

Unfortunately, most witness aren't so proprietary.The lure of money, the prestige of the courtroom, the infectious team spirit that comes from working on a big case, all tempt experts to abandon the basic ethical canons of their profession. One would hope that from our adversarial system, from the clash of opposing expertise, the truth would emerge. But as in industry or government, fraud and incompetence plague the expert witness business. So too does reticence--an unwillingness to speak up when justice is being misserved.

No one knows that better than Gary Dotson,whose case made headlines after it turned out that he had been wrongly convicted for raping Cathleen Webb. When Webb admitted that she had lied about being raped, Dotson was freed by James Thompson, the governor of Illinois. Only a few accounts of the story focused on Timothy R. Dixon, the police expert whose testimony helped put Dotson away.

Dixon had testified that the seminal materialfound on Webb's panties matched Gary Dotson's blood type.

But at the time, and during the years Dotsonwas held in prison, Dixon did not say what he knew full well--that Cathleen Webb's own vaginal discharges, not necessarily semen, could have caused the stains. Years later, a Washington Post reporter asked Dixon why he didn't speak up. "I guess I wasn't asked,' he said.