At the recommendation of one of the editors of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, I recently read Jennifer Mnookin’s excellent article on “modular” expert evidence. In our forthcoming paper, Will Crozier and I suggested that expert evidence about false confessions and the fallibility of eyewitness memory is excluded on the basis of a misunderstanding of human psychology. In short, Canadian courts deem expertise unnecessary because it simply duplicates the knowledge and experience and the factfinder. We disagree: people are often not aware of how their memory works and how strong the impact of the situation is on their behaviour (including those forces that produce false confessions).

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