LEGAL EXPERTISE, CONSULTATION AND TESTIMONY

Human Factors Consultants specializes in providing legal expertise, consultation and testimony on eyewitness identification, including issues that affect the accuracy of perception, memory, and line-up procedures; on fingerprint comparisons, including issues that affect the accuracy of comparisons, the methods used, and the underlying science of fingerprint examinations; language assessment and comprehension; children's understanding, including memory, testimony and interviewing; sexual and racial harassment; recovered memory; and causes of safety failures and accidents, including human factors analyses of product design, training, instructions, and warnings.

Ralph Haber, Ph.D., and Lyn Haber, Ph.D., are the two partners in Human Factors Consultants. We are scientists who provide testimony about the factors identified in scientific research that are relevant to the facts of a specific case. We have assisted clients in ten states and six Federal court districts. We have been retained by both plaintiffs and defendants in over 100 civil cases, and by both prosecution and defense in over 100 criminal cases. Research has strongly documented that two heads working together are better than one. Our partnership is an instance: we offer the legal community the best consultative services and the finest understandable, scientifically based courtroom presentations.

Our services include:

Consultation
Review of existing research
Collection of new research
Training of legal staff on scientific expertise

Reports and affidavits
Deposition testimony
Expert testimony in court

Do you have a case in which you represent the State (Plaintiff) or the Defendant involving any of the following issues? If so, CLICK on the issue below to see the kinds of expert testimony we can provide:

• Perceiving: An eyewitness testifies based on perceiving under excellent or difficult circumstances.
• Memory: An eyewitness testifies from memory about events he or she observed.
• Lineup Identification: An eyewitness identifies the defendant in a show-up, line-up, photo-spread or mug-book.
• Recovered Memory: An eyewitness testifies about events from a recovered memory.
• Fingerprints: A fingerprint examiner matches the defendant’s fingerprints to a crime scene latent.
• Child Witness: A child provides information through questioning, testimony or identification.
• Language Assessment: Your client’s case depends on an issue of written or spoken language.
• Sexual or Racial Harassment: Your client is accused of harassment, or receives harassment.
• Interviewing and Interrogation: Evidence in your case was obtained though intensive interviewing or interrogation.
• Safety: Your client sues or is sued over a safety failure due to a defective product, maintenance, instruction, training, or warning.
• Accident: Your client sues or is sued over the causation of an automobile, truck, train, aircraft, business, industrial, or home accident.

Ralph Haber received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Stanford University, his BA and MA from the University of Michigan and Wesleyan University, respectively, and post-graduate training in Cambridge, England in human factors from the Medical Research Council. He has held full time teaching and research appointments at Stanford University, Yale University, the University of Rochester, and the University of Illinois, has been chairman of the psychology department at the University of Rochester, has held a full time research appointment with the United States Air Force, and has held visiting appointments at many other universities.

He has 48 years of teaching, research and applied professional experience in psychology, with specialization in visual perception, memory, thinking, decision making, human error, human factors, training and evaluation, and forensic identification. He has received 25 grants and contracts from the United States government and the United States Military. He has published 8 books and 250 professional scientific papers, and given over 100 conference and convention presentations.

Lyn Haber received her Ph.D. and MA in experimental linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. Her BA is from Brandeis University in English Literature. She also has a degree in German from the University of Vienna, a master’s degree in Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and national certification as a Speech-Language Pathologist. She has held full-time teaching and research positions at Temple University, the University of Rochester, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Arizona State University at Tempe. She has designed training programs and then trained teachers/nurses/locomotive engineers and evaluated the results in a number of contexts, including an English-as-a-Second-Language program for Russians living in Italy, VA staff caring for language-impaired veterans, teachers of both deaf and blind students; and training and certification programs for freight railway locomotive engineers.

Her specialties include analysis and diagnosis of language ability in children and adults, the design and evaluation of training programs, how questioning influences memory and recall accuracy, verbal and nonverbal harassment, and the science of fingerprint comparisons. She has received 8 grants and contracts from the United States Government, published 8 books, 80 scientific research articles, and given over 100 conference and convention presentations.