If the court decides to consider admitting cultural evidence, great care must be taken in qualifying the experts. Thorough voir dire of the proposed experts is critical. Following the New York bench trial described earlier, in which women in the Chinese immigrant community feared physical abuse from their partners after a defendant was convicted of a reduced charge and then given the minimum sentence of five years probation for killing his wife, members of the Chinese and Asian American communities were outraged at the stereotypes and inaccurate information presented by the so-called expert witness on Chinese culture. For example, the testimony offered by a white anthropologist, described the Chinese, compared to Americans, as being more volatile and violent (Volpp, (Mis)Identifying Culture, 1994).

Cross-examination of the expert revealed that he had never heard of a Chinese case in which a man had killed his wife, yet he testified that this act was accepted in China. Nevertheless, the judge gave the expert testimony and the inaccurate cultural profile considerable weight in his decision when he described the Defendant as "a product of his culture.... The culture was never an excuse, but it is something that made him crack more easily. That was the factor, the cracking factor." (Nina Schuyler, Cultural Defense: Equality or Anarchy?, San Francisco Weekly, Sept. 25, 1991.)

When evaluating the expert witness testimony, it is also necessary to ask from whose perspective the "culture" is being described. In this wife-murder case, the anthropologist presented the story from a male perspective. As pointed out by one commentator, the expert did not consider the gender oppression experienced by women in Chinese society because the expert's testimony "obviate[d] the possibility that a woman might describe divorce, adultery and male violence within 'Chinese culture' very differently." (Volpp, (Mis)Identifying Culture, 1994).