Should You Pay for Your Own Expert Opinion? What CMK 67/6 buys against a state laboratory report

Article 67 of the Code of Criminal Procedure carries both documents in its heading — bilirkişi raporu, uzman mütalaası — and they are obtained in different ways. CMK 67/6 allows the suspect or defendant, defence counsel and the legal representative to obtain a scientific opinion from their own specialist: on the event that is the subject of the proceedings, for evaluation while the expert report is being prepared, or about that report once it exists. No application is needed. The paragraph closes with the sentence that governs your timetable — additional time may not be requested on that ground alone.

Set that against CMK 67/5. Once the examinations are complete a period is given so that a fresh expert examination can be requested or objections notified, and a refusal must be a reasoned decision given within three days. That route asks the court to order a second official examination: it costs nothing and the court may refuse. CMK 67/6 costs money and nobody can refuse it. Most files need both, in that order.

Your specialist is not an expert of the court: he is not drawn from the board list under CMK 64, nor paid from the Ministry tariff in CMK 72. He is what CMK 221/1 calls a teknik danışman, a technical adviser, and he is bound by the laboratory's own limit: CMK 67/3 keeps an expert to matters requiring special or technical knowledge and forbids the legal characterisations that belong to the judge. An opinion arguing that the file is possession rather than trafficking is a defence submission in a laboratory coat, and a court reads it as one.

Before deciding what to commission, establish what still exists. Seized narcotics are governed by Law no. 2313, article 20, not by the Code alone.

• The substance is seized by a record and held by the prosecutor's office as evidence. A quantity sufficient for the analyses is taken as a sample and sent to the laboratory, so that type, quality and amount can be established definitively.
• Since the amendment of 28 March 2023, once the definitive reports are in, the sulh ceza judgeship may order confiscation at any stage of the investigation, provided that samples taken under the regulation are retained. The bulk then goes sealed to the local civil administration and, under 2313 m.21, is destroyed before a committee with the provincial prosecutor attending.
• The retained samples take a different route: they are confiscated with the judgment and handed over only after the judgment becomes final.

So by the time a family abroad has read the report, the bulk has usually been destroyed and the retained sample is the only material left. A fresh analysis has to be asked of the court under CMK 67/5; your specialist cannot obtain the sample himself. What he can always do is read the file, and in most drug cases that is where the answerable questions are — not least because CMK 66/7 requires a list and a count of the things given to the expert under seal, recorded in a tutanak, and obliges the expert to record the breaking and reapplication of the seals.

A privately funded opinion earns its cost when it answers a technical question the mandate never put, and is wasted when it merely disagrees with a conclusion the mandate did put.

Because no extra time may be requested on this ground, the instruction has to go out while the CMK 67/5 period is still running. And CMK 178, which lets you bring a refused specialist to court yourself, carries its own limit: requests made in order to prolong the case are refused.

A written opinion sitting in the file is not yet evidence: CMK 217/1 allows the judge to base his decision only on evidence brought to the hearing and discussed in his presence.

CMK 68/3 applies the rules on hearing the court's expert to the specialist who prepared the opinion, so on request he can be called to explain his findings; under CMK 177/1 the petition asking for him to be summoned must reach the presiding judge at least five days before the hearing.

Then check the minutes. CMK 221/1 requires them to name the technical adviser, to contain the explanations of experts and technical advisers, and to record requests together with the reason where one is refused. Under CMK 222/1 they are the only proof of how the hearing was conducted, so an opinion handed up and not minuted is, in the file an appeal court later reads, an opinion never produced. CMK 230/1-b then requires the reasoned judgment to state what evidence was relied on and what rejected, and CMK 289/1-h makes a court decision restricting the defence right, on a matter important to the judgment, an absolute breach of law — where the appeal stages begin.

Who writes the laboratory report, and why type, weight and purity do three different jobs, is set out on the forensic drug report page. Where those findings move a file between the paragraphs of TCK 188 belongs with drug trafficking, and possession and personal use are dealt with under drug offences.