California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from People v. Kittles, A154955 (Cal. App. 2020):
Reardon does not aid defendant in any respect. There the defendant sought to admit testimony regarding the reasonableness of certain police actions, a subject about which expert testimony might assist the jury. Here, in contrast, defendant claimed the expert would "assist the jury in understanding and evaluating the reasonableness of [his own] actions," including "whether he should have fired his own gun in self[-]defense or whether he should have run." "Psychologists, psychiatrists or sociologists may have specialized empirical knowledge regarding the range of reactions to a given provocation, or the reaction of the statistically average individual in a given community. But this information would not materially assist the jury in its task." (People v. Czahara (1988) 203 Cal.App.3d 1468, 1478.) "[P]sychiatric testimony on adequacy of provocation is inadmissible [because] . . . the adequacy of provocation is not a subject sufficiently beyond common experience that the opinion of an expert would assist the trier of fact. [Citation.] Rather, the reasonableness of a reaction is left to the jurors
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