Criminal Defense Expert Witness,
Police Practices for the Defense Bar

• Professor Gregory Gilbertson (Ret.): thirty-eight years across policing, the Army, the classroom, and investigative casework. Independent consultants are retained case-by-case where the record calls for a second discipline.
• Retained in more than 220 civil rights and criminal cases across 42 states and the District of Columbia; expert practice since 2014.
• Retained by plaintiff’s counsel and by the defense alike, in civil and criminal matters.
• Fees are published: a $9,000 flat fee covering discovery review and the written expert report; the full schedule is on For Retaining Counsel.
• Attorney and law-firm inquiries only; conflicts are checked before any substantive discussion. (239) 571-1840.

Gregory is not an attorney and offers no legal advice; the analysis serves retained counsel.

The charge decides which part of the police file is in question, because each charge rests on different police work. Where the officers' reports are the account of what the defendant did, the arrest and the force are in question; where the evidence came from a stop or a search, the stop and the search are; where the charge rests on an investigation or an identification, the investigation or the identification procedure is. A police practices expert retained by criminal defense counsel starts from the charge and reads first the part of the file that charge rests on, then the rest of the record around it. When the accused is a juvenile, that record also holds the custody, notification and questioning records particular to a young suspect, read as set out under juvenile defense.

Resisting arrest, obstruction and assault on an officer are charges of the first kind. In each of them, the account the charge rests on is written in the same reports that record the arrest and any force. The file that carries that account is specific: the arrest report, any use-of-force report with its supplements, the supervisor's review of any force, the dispatch record made while the call was live, and any video the encounter produced.

For the arrest, the file is read for what the officers knew before custody and how they recorded it, the questions treated under false arrest and search; the force is measured on the whole encounter as the officers knew it at the time, without hindsight, the way any use of force question is measured. A departure from policy, from training or from accepted practice is reported as a practices finding; whether it bears on the charge is a legal question, and legal conclusions remain counsel's. Where the reports, the dispatch record and the video describe the same sequence differently, the analysis locates each divergence and the record behind each version, and what a divergence means is left to the finder of fact and counsel.

Homicide and serious-felony charges rest on an investigation: what the investigators collected, whom they interviewed, and how they reached the conclusion the charge now carries. That path is the police work in question, and the file for it holds the scene documentation and photographs, the canvass notes, the recording or summary of each interview, the supplements that open and close each lead, and the evidence submissions. The path is measured against the agency's investigative policies and generally accepted police practices, as in any review of deficient investigations, and where self-defense is claimed, the investigation is also read under self-defense. Autopsy and laboratory reports belong in the file the analysis reads, and every medical and scientific question in them is deferred to qualified experts.

An identification case rests on the procedure that produced the identification. The practices question is how that procedure was run: which procedure the officers chose, who administered it, what the witness was told before viewing, and what the file preserved of what the witness said at the viewing. That record is read against the policy the agency had in force at the time and the practices described in photo lineups, while the reliability of the identification itself is deferred to qualified experts.

One case can carry charges from more than one of these families, such as a weapons count beside an assault on an officer arising from the same encounter. Each charge's practice question is then answered separately, from the part of the file that charge rests on, so one report can find the search consistent with accepted practice and the arrest not, or the reverse. The records particular to running a homicide case, from the lead record to the charging decision, are taken up under homicide defense.

The table of cases lists each retention under the caption of its matter, and 46 matters in it are captioned as prosecutions: 45 in state courts across 12 states, and 1 in federal court. The figures count retentions, not results.

Every matter in the table carries a practice label, and a prosecution can carry several, so the label counts overlap rather than add up. Among the prosecutions, 23 carry the homicide defense label, 19 the self-defense label and 3 the false arrest label, and a prosecution that carries none of them counts only in the total. Each of those labels points to the page that carries that work in a criminal case: a homicide prosecution to homicide defense, a claim of justification to self-defense, and an arrest or a search challenged before trial to suppression support.

The matters with published results are in the case history, and they are a part of this table, not the whole of it; retaining counsel can ask for the complete table and read every prosecution in it by caption.

Case accounts as published by retaining counsel. Outcomes depend on their facts; no result is promised for any other matter.