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The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy. ciated or accepted by many forensic science practitioners, judges, jurors, policymakers, or lawyers and their clients.5 THE FRYE STANDARD AND RULE 702 OF THE FEDERAL RULES OF EVIDENCEDuring the twentieth century, as science advanced, the legal system “attempted to develop coherent tests for the admissibility of scientific evidence.”6 The first notable development occurred in 1923 with the issuance of the landmark decision in Frye v. United States.7 The Frye case involved a murder trial in which the defendant sought to demonstrate his innocence through the admission of a lie detector test that measured systolic blood pressure. The court rejected the evidence, stating: Just when a scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this twilight zone the evidential force of the principle must be recognized, and while courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well-recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.8 The Frye decision held that the lie detector test was unreliable because it had not gained “general acceptance” in the relevant scientific community. The meaning of the Frye test is elusive. Indeed, “[t]he merits of the Frye test have been much debated, and scholarship on its proper scope and application is legion.”9 For many years, the Frye test was cited in both civil and criminal cases, but it was applied most frequently in criminal cases.10 “In the 70 years since its formulation in the Frye case, the ‘general acceptance’
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