Obrońca wobec opinii biegłego w procesie karnym

In accordance with the binding criminal procedure, the defender may request that an expert witness is called to court by addressing an appropriate motion to a judicial body (the prosecutor or the court). The body may consider the motion but is not obliged to do so. Once the witness has been called to court, he or she can be questioned, and his or her expertise and/or impartiality can be examined. Demanding the appointment of a different expert witness is also an option once circumstances that allow or require the exclusion of the previous one have occurred. A motion to appoint another expert witness before the court can be made, yet only if it has been proved that the current expert opinion has been incomplete or unclear, internally contradictory, or contradictory to other opinions issued in the same case. An expert witness may be called to court only by a judicial body. The defender has no right to the appointment of his or her own expert witness. The most recent revision of the Code of Criminal Procedure (KPK), whose goal was to increase the degree of fairness of trials, still does not envisage the option to have expert witnesses called to court by the defence. The court and prosecutor will continue to have a monopoly on the appointment of expert witnesses. The defence can only provide ‘a private opinion’ issued at its behest. This cannot, however, have the status of an expert opinion (with all the due consequences) but only the status of a private statement that may be read out at the trail but cannot be confronted with an expert witness opinion.