Admissibility of a surveyor’s plan prepared from field assistants’ data
As to plans the statute only requires that the licensed surveyor certifies his plan: see the Survey Act, 1962 (Act 127), ss. 6-12. This ensures that there is someone to fall on in case of inaccuracy. Acquaintance with survey work, in particular the drawing of plans, as derived from experience in our courts, discloses that survey details and data are invariably collected by field assistants and recorded in field note books. The surveyor utilises these details in drawing up his plans. He vouches for the plans when he imprints his stamp on the plans. One would venture to say that the making of plans would inexorably impeded court work if all surveys and measurements were to be personally undertaken by the licensed surveyor.
Certainly, the burden of proof of identity of the land could not be discharged by a lay opinion. The expert had to come into the box to demonstrate how his conclusion was reached and avail himself for cross-examination if found necessary. It occurs to us that the statutory condition to call for the adduction of evidence pursuant to Section 122 of the Evidence Act (NRCD 323) was triggered. The provision states: “If the subject of the testimony is sufficiently beyond common experience that the opinion or inference of an expert will assist the court or tribunal of fact in understanding evidence in the action or in determining any issue, a witness may give testimony in the form of an opinion on inference concerning any subject on which the witness is qualified to give expert testimony.
An expert opinion is only as good as the factual foundation on which it rests; an impeccable analysis of the wrong subject matter proves nothing about the right one.
Weight of expert evidence and its rejection by the court
The law as to expert evidence is well settled. The opinion of an expert is admitted to furnish the court with information likely to be outside its own experience; but it is not binding. The tribunal of fact is not obliged to accept it, for expert evidence is a guide to assist the court to its own conclusion on the whole of the evidence, not a substitute for that conclusion. What the law requires is that, where such evidence is rejected, it be rejected judicially, for reasons that are given and that are grounded in the record and not capriciously.
