Statisticians Leading with Justice for All
Lisa LaVange
In the past two issues of Amstat News, I have focused on building the ASA Leadership Institute. This month, I want to highlight another 2018 presidential initiative—expert witness training. The idea for such a program came from our membership.
Early in 2017, Executive Director Ron Wasserstein heard from several members about whether the ASA could help prepare consulting statisticians for service as expert witnesses in a trial or deposition. Around the same time, I had occasion to talk with a former University of North Carolina biostatistics student, Naomi Brownstein, and she described her interest in being an expert witness. Now a statistics faculty member at Florida State University, Naomi had been approached about serving in this capacity. So, Ron and I put our heads together to assess the need for this kind of training and came up with a proposal.
There are areas of the law that involve quantitative expertise. Ensuring there are qualified statistical professionals in the courtroom or otherwise involved with the legal process in those areas would improve the quality of the legal process and increase recognition of the important contributions of statistics and statisticians.
There are many leaders in our field who regularly step up to serve the courts on a variety of important topics, and our sister fields—such as mathematics—are also stepping up to contribute. Gerrymandering of legislative districts, for instance, is one topic that has drawn attention of late. Gerrymandering struck a chord with me, living in two states (Maryland and North Carolina) that have been accused of extreme partisan gerrymandering—but in opposite political directions. Other topics include investigations of Medicaid fraud by medical providers and using “risk-limiting audits” to detect problems with elections. These topics often end up in court, and statisticians should be prepared to chip in.
One aspect of the FDA’s mission to protect and promote the public health that I did not fully appreciate until working there was the need to ensure product claims made in labeling and advertising were accurate and did not mislead the public. Evaluating the evidence to determine whether product statements are misleading is the subject of FDA guidance documents, but these determinations often end up in court, where a company’s first amendment rights in making claims about a product are weighed against the agency’s need to ensure such claims do not mislead the public.
A recent example is the Federal Trade Commission’s suit against Quincy Bioscience that questioned the use of secondary analysis to support a claim about a treatment for memory loss after the trial failed on its primary endpoints. The FTC lost the claim, and no statisticians were involved as expert witnesses due to the nature of the suit, but statistical theory about inference in general and multiplicity in particular formed the basis of the FTC’s argument.
Given the interest in training among ASA members, requests for ASA’s assistance as expert witnesses from other parties, and my own interest in this topic, Ron and I presented our proposal for an expert witness training program to the board, and thus was born a presidential initiative.
Our vision is to develop a program that provides the general skills and knowledge a statistician should have to be an expert witness, as well as prepare participants to speak as an expert on at least one subject matter area. To this end, we formed a working group made up of leading statisticians Joseph L. Gastwirth, Mary W. Gray, Nicholas P. Jewell, and Rochelle E. Tractenberg and asked Kathy Ensor of Rice University to be the chair. The assembled team includes a lawyer and statisticians with courtroom experience.
I asked Kathy, as chair, to report on the deliberations of the working group to date, and here is what she had to say:
Leaders in our field have often provided expertise to the courts and Congress, many learning by experience. The objective of this training program for statistical expert witnesses is to help our community, especially those new to our profession, expedite the learning curve on how to best serve the courts as an expert statistician.
There were exciting suggestions for what should and should not be included in a training workshop. Although our experiences varied, several common themes emerged, including the following:
- What it means to be an expert witness
- What it means to be an expert statistical witness
- Voicing a clear unbiased statistical opinion at all stages of the legal process
- Ethical considerations as practicing professional statisticians
- Common mistakes and pitfalls to avoid
The role our profession has played in the courts throughout history is laudable. The role of the expert statistician emerged strongly in the 1980s. As a young statistician, I recall reading with great enthusiasm the text “Statistics and the Law” by [Morris] DeGroot, [Stephen] Fienberg, and [Joseph] Kadane and then later Jay Kadane’s 2008 book, “Statistics in the Law: A Practitioner’s Guide, Cases, and Materials.” I guess this speaks to my love of statistics and its application, as I read the books with the deep immersion great novels require.
The vast array of areas in which statisticians interact with the courts simply boggles the mind—areas such as employment discrimination, DNA, medical practice, environmental issues, patent challenges, economic risk, and financial fraud.
The recent creation of the National Institute of Standards and Technology–supported Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE) recognizes the important role statisticians play in forensic science and hence the legal system. The expert witness working group also noted emerging areas that include statistical and machine learning algorithms potentially guiding decisions of the courts and the criminal justice system. Equally as broad as the societal issues statisticians are asked to address are the areas of statistics in which statisticians serve as experts. And given the demand for our expertise, we as a committee were reminded that one important component to serving as an expert is knowing when to decline a request.
We are developing a training program with the following key goals in mind:
- Quality – Develop a program that provides excellent training and meets, or even exceeds, the needs of our members
- Impact – Develop a program that can reach a substantial number of people over time
- Sustainability – Develop a program that can be offered regularly and support itself financially
An RFP for training program development will be announced, pending approval by the ASA Board. The general goal is to begin the program either in the fall of 2018 or spring of 2019. Once developed, this program will become part of the ASA Leadership Institute, offered at a frequency deemed helpful to our community.
My thanks go to Kathy and her team for the work accomplished so far, and I look forward to seeing this program roll out in the coming months. I believe the program will be a valuable resource to ASA members, and we have certainly heard from several who are anxiously awaiting its inception. This is yet another example of an area in which strong statistical leadership can have an impact that extends far beyond our membership.
So, here’s to statisticians leading with justice for all!
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