Self-Defense Expert Witness,
and the Investigation Behind the Case

• 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.

Retained by criminal defense counsel for armed citizens, and in civil matters where a defensive use of force is at issue. A police-practices background matters here: use-of-force training gives a jury a framework it can follow.

When a person claims self-defense, the investigation already knows who used the force in question. What stays open is the sequence that led to it: how the encounter began, the words and gestures that passed between the parties, what the other party held or reached for, and what the scene and the nearby cameras recorded. A self-defense expert witness who addresses police practices reads how the investigation worked that open question and holds the investigators to their agency's policy and to generally accepted police practices.

The officers who arrived first, and the supervisors and detectives who followed them, made decisions the rest of the file depends on: how the scene was secured and documented, what happened to any weapon on the ground, and how the person who used force was handled. The file shows how that person was treated and when the treatment changed: detained, advised of rights, transported, interviewed, and described in the first reports as a victim, a witness or a suspect. The label alone is not the finding. The practices question is whether the investigation stayed open to justification after the suspect label attached.

Applied to a self-defense file, tunnel vision takes a particular shape: the force is treated as the offense, and the facts that bear on justification are left for someone else to find. In the file, that looks like leads opened and never worked: the witness who saw the other party advance, the object found near the other party, the camera on the house across the street. The analysis follows each such lead from the entry that opened it to the report that closed it, or to the place in the file where that report should be.

In a self-defense matter, the video that shows the approach may belong to someone other than the police: a doorbell camera, a business system, a phone in a bystander's hand. Whether the canvass looked for it, when a copy was requested, who exported it and how, and whether the original was secured are practices questions the file answers or leaves open. A camera noted on a canvass sheet with no later entry is an unworked lead, and a recording an officer watched at the scene but never collected is evidence the investigation found and left behind. Placing a private recording against dispatch and body-worn camera time is the work of video and timeline reconciliation.

Physical evidence raises the same questions. The object the other party held or dropped, the defendant's firearm and the clothing both parties wore each need a documented history from the scene onward, read against accepted practice for chain of custody. Injuries to the person claiming self-defense are a documentation question in this review: whether they were photographed and recorded, with every medical question about them deferred to qualified experts.

Autopsy and forensic reports belong to the record the analysis reads, with their medical and scientific questions deferred to qualified experts in those disciplines. Where a case needs the physical sequence worked out from the scene itself, that is crime scene analysis, a separate discipline, and the referral is to FBI Special Agent Christopher Holland (Ret.). The reports written about all of this are read against one another: an early report that records what the defendant said about the other party's weapon, set beside a later narrative that drops it, is a change the analysis locates and sources.

The practice's table of cases lists 21 matters under the self-defense label, across 5 states, and 16 of those matters carry the homicide defense label as well, a label that covers manslaughter and attempted murder charges beside murder. A matter carries the self-defense label because its entry records self-defense as an issue in the case. The larger part of the set is prosecutions.

In a prosecution, the self-defense expert witness comes into the case through defense counsel, and the record at the center of the work is the police investigation of the incident. The homicide defense label has a page of its own, homicide defense, which takes up how the homicide case itself was run, and self-defense work is one part of criminal-defense support, which reads the police file for the defense bar charge by charge.

Where the matter is civil, the self-defense expert witness reads the same investigation record for the civil proceeding, together with what the suit adds to the record, such as deposition transcripts, and the opinion stays on police practices. Legal conclusions remain counsel's, including what a practices finding means for the claims and defenses in the suit.

What the figures count is retentions in the file, not results. Where a result has been published, it is in the case history, and that page says which results it carries.

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