An Empirical Study On The Reliability Determination Of Civil Scientific Evidence

According to the persuasion theory,there are two different decision-making paths for judges in the process of scientific evidence review.When judges choose the central route,they will rely on the information provided by the substance of the scientific evidence to make reliability determination decisions,when choosing the peripheral path;judge will make reliability determination decisions based on heuristic information.According to the corresponding evidence theory,and the current evidence system and rules,judges have discretion in the reliability determination of scientific evidence,so they can use their discretion to choose different paths to make decisions.Accordingly,on the expected level,there are many possibilities for the judges' decision-making path in determining the reliability of the specific scientific evidence,and the specific choice of the decision-making path is subject to internal factors such as cognitive motivation,cognitive ability,and the appearance of the experts,auxiliary mechanisms and other external factors.Moreover,the decision-making path selection of judges in specific cases is not fixed.It is possible to switch between different paths due to various factors.And the path switching will also cause the substantive factors and heuristic factors to jointly affect judges' decision-making.Due to the doubts on the cognitive ability of judges,forensic report is selected as the specific type of scientific evidence to analysis judges'decision-making,First of all,the random sampling method was used to obtain the judgment documents containing the three major types of forensic reports and other data from the China Judgments Online and the National Judicial Appraisal Directory.Secondly,the authenticity of scientific evidence used as dependent variable;the institution's certification,the average number of judicial experts,the average number of senior vocational experts,the age of institution and the proportion of cases consigned by the judiciary areselected as independent variables;the trial organization form,the parties' objections,the appraiser's response,the auxiliary opinion,and the interest in dispute are used as moderator;the subject of appraisal consigning and the appraisal opinion category are used as control variables.finally,logistic regression model are used to analysis the correlation between heuristic factors and the reliability of scientific evidence,as well as the effect of the adjustment variables.The results show that,the average number of experts and the proportion of cases consigned by the judiciary have significant positive impact on the reliability of scientific evidence.The appeal interest has played a significant role in regulating the correlation between the proportion of cases consigned by the judiciary and the reliability of scientific evidence.The results also show that,in the judicial practice of our country,although judges have certain cognitive deficiencies in the reliability determination of scientific evidence,they still have certain cognitive ability related to the reliability determination of scientific evidence.But this cognitive ability is not sufficient to form a conviction about the reliability of scientific evidence by examining the substance of scientific evidence.Therefore,heuristic information is needed to make specific decisions about the reliability of scientific evidence.Both the cognitive deficiencies and the alternative solution based on the cognitive deficiencies will lead to the lack of accuracy of the judges' findings on the reliability of scientific evidence.Thus,we can draw conclusions that,judges'reliability determination behavior lacks legitimacy.Because judges do not have the cognitive ability to conduct a comprehensive and effective examination of the substance of scientific evidence,in addition to affecting the accuracy of the scientific evidence reliability review,it may further affect the authority of the fact finding,and ultimately lead to a decline in judicial credibility.Therefore,it is absolutely necessary to standardize the relevant behaviors and mechanisms for the evaluation of scientific evidence reliability.On the basis of full consideration of the diversity of the methods in improving judges' cognitive ability,the inevitability of the lack of cognitive ability,and the adjustability of the empirical information,the specific behaviors of judges to determine scientific evidence reliability can be regulated from the aspects of improving the cognitive ability,strengthening the scientific evidence review mechanism,and improving the relevant mechanisms for the adjustment of empirical information.