ABSTRACT
A party to a legal matter, or a percipient witness, can testify on any areas deemed by the court to be applicable to his status in the case, but cannot give opinions on matters beyond his involvement. If you witness a robbery at the local convenience store, you may be asked to testify at the trial of the alleged perpetrator of the crime. e limits of your testimony will be exclusively to what you know, what you saw, what you heard, and the conditions of the environment that you experienced at the time of the robbery. Take the same scenario of the convenience-store robbery, and expand the hypothetical to having a customer wounded by the robber. ere could be a totally dierent and separate legal action brought by the customer against the store owner. In this second case, the action would not be criminal but rather a civil action brought against the store owner for not providing adequate premises safeguards. e case would pivot on which, if any, safeguards or precautions the store owner took to protect the premises from customer injury. is consumer safety and security testimony falls to the purview of an expert witness qualied in this area by virtue of training and experience. e expert witness becomes qualied in those areas that are not, or cannot, be supported by the testimony of lay witnesses. is is generally in a technical or scientic area of information.
