The objection to a forensic report has a period of its own. The Code opens it and does not say how long it lasts.

The report arrives as a finished document. CMK 67/1 requires the expert to sign a report setting out the operations carried out and the conclusions reached, stating expressly that the examinations asked of him were performed, and to return the sealed items with a record made of the return.

CMK 67/4 governs how it reaches you: copies may be handed over during the hearing to the prosecutor, the participant, the suspect or accused and defence counsel, or sent by registered post with acknowledgment of receipt. CMK 67/5 then does the work. Once the examinations are complete, a period is given to those same people so that they can request a fresh expert examination or notify their objections; where such a request is refused, a reasoned decision on it is to be given within three days.

Two features of that period matter. The Code sets no number — not seven days, not thirty. The length is set by the court, or during the investigation by the prosecutor, who under CMK 63/3 holds the same powers. In a detained defendant's file it often runs between two hearings weeks apart; in a quieter file it can be a single sentence at the end of a session. And it runs from service, not from comprehension: a report posted to your address in Turkish starts it whether or not you could read it. Counsel holding a copy of the file is the only dependable way of being inside the period rather than hearing about it afterwards.

An objection must identify a defect. Disagreement with the conclusion is not one: CMK 217/1 leaves evidence to the judge's free evaluation according to his conscientious conviction, so a submission saying only that the result is wrong gives him nothing to decide. Three groups of grounds do work.

The expert answered the wrong question

CMK 67/3 forbids the expert, in the report and in oral explanations, from making statements outside matters whose resolution requires expertise or special or technical knowledge, and from making the legal characterisation and assessment that belong to the judge. CMK 63/1 draws the same line from the other side: an expert may not be resorted to on questions capable of resolution by general knowledge or experience, or by the legal knowledge the judicial office requires; and a person who has studied law may not be appointed unless a separate expertise outside law is documented.

The mandate was defective

Read the appointment decision before the report. CMK 66/1 requires it to state the questions requiring expertise, the subject of the examination and the period for performing the task — a period that may not exceed three months, extendable on the expert's request, by reasoned decision, by three months at most. An examination that answers a question never put, or omits one that was, is an incomplete mandate rather than a matter of opinion.

The item examined was not shown to be yours

CMK 66/7 requires a list and a count of the things to be examined before they go to the expert under seal, recorded in a tutanak, and obliges the expert to record the opening and re-sealing of the seals and to draw up a list. Weights, packet counts and seal numbers on the seizure record and on the laboratory intake record are meant to agree. Where they do not, that gap is the objection, and it belongs with how the substance was found and taken.

A fourth route concerns the person rather than the paper: under CMK 69 the grounds for a judge's recusal apply to an expert, the appointed expert's name is notified to those entitled to challenge unless there is an impediment, and whoever challenges must state the reason together with the facts relied on.

CMK 67/5 offers two different requests. Notifying objections asks the court to discount or confine the existing report. Requesting a new examination asks for a second one. A request for a second examination that does not say what the first got wrong, and what the second should be asked, is the request most often refused.

CMK 66/5 gives that request its shape: the interested parties may ask the appointing authority to decide that persons they name, who can supply technical information to the expert, be heard, or that particular investigations be carried out.

Two cautions. CMK 67/6 ends with a sentence that regularly costs defendants their advantage: additional time may not be requested on the ground of obtaining a scientific opinion alone, so the specialist has to be instructed while the period is running. And CMK 178 carries its own limit in the same article — requests made in order to prolong the case are refused.

The period expires and the file moves on. That is not, strictly, a preclusion: CMK 207 provides that a request to produce evidence may not be refused on the ground that the evidence, or the fact to be proved by it, was notified late. What changes is the ground available to the court. CMK 206/2 permits refusal where evidence was obtained unlawfully, where the fact it would prove has no effect on the judgment, or where the request was made only to prolong proceedings. A late objection carrying nothing new attracts the third; one carrying a specialist's written opinion, a discrepancy in the seal records, or a question the mandate never asked is far harder to place there.

Two provisions decide what you keep. CMK 217/1 allows the court to base its judgment only on evidence brought to the hearing and discussed in the judge's presence; your own right to be present at the hearing comes from CMK 193 and CMK 196, not from this article. CMK 230/1-b requires the reasoned judgment to discuss and evaluate the evidence and to state what was relied on and what rejected. A refusal never reasoned, on a point important to the outcome, is what CMK 289/1-h calls a restriction of the defence right by a decision of the court.

That is what an appeal is built from. Since the amendment made by Law no. 7499 of 2 March 2024, CMK 273/1 allows two weeks to apply for istinaf, running from service of the judgment together with its reasoning rather than from its pronouncement; CMK 291/1 now reads the same way for temyiz. Under CMK 280/1-a the regional court examines whether there is any deficiency in the evidence or in the proceedings, and CMK 281/2 lets it decide, where the case is reheard, that witnesses and experts be heard: both stages are set out on the appeals page.

All of this concerns the objection. What the report is, who may write it and how its findings on type, weight and purity differ from one another belong to the forensic drug report page; where those findings move a case between the paragraphs of TCK 188 is dealt with under drug trafficking.