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Administrative Order 2026-03 (Expert Witness Compensation and Procedures in Criminal Cases), signed February 18, 2026, is the circuit's current expert-witness order — a verified PDF in BenchPath custody.
Criminal cases, all six counties.
• The Court shall initially appoint only one expert to determine competency. If the findings of the initial expert are not stipulated to by the parties, the Court may appoint up to two (2) additional experts. • The Court shall be responsible to pay for the expert’s evaluation and report, for those experts appointed by court order, upon motion of counsel for the defendant, or the State, or upon its own motion, to determine the mental health condition of defendants in criminal cases. 2 • The Court shall not be responsible to pay for the testimony of experts that are subpoenaed or otherwise requested by either counsel for the defendant or the State in any hearing or trial. Payment for testimony shall be the responsibility of the party subpoenaing the expert. • However, if the presiding judge determines the testimony of an expert is necessary and issues an order requiring the expert to appear, the Court shall be responsible for payment. II. RATES AND PROCEDURES • Experts must submit their invoice using the approved template to Court Administration at CriminalCM@leoncountyfl.gov. The invoice shall include, at a minimum, the case number, the name of the person examined, the date of the examination, and the amount. The expert must submit a copy of the judge’s order with the invoice for payment. • Any complaint or grievance regarding an expert shall be submitted in writing to the Trial Court Administrator for review by the Chief Judge.
The Court shall initially appoint only one expert to determine competency. If the findings of the initial expert are not stipulated to by the parties, the Court may appoint up to two (2) additional experts.
Reviewer note: | Set to in_review 2026-07-26: the order's subject looks practitioner-facing but the extracted text captured only recitals or an effective date, not the operative ORDERED section. This is an extraction defect, not a judgement that the order is unimportant — it needs re-extraction before it goes back on the published surface. | Re-extracted 2026-07-26 from the numbered paragraphs following the order's ORDERED clause, replacing a first pass that had captured recitals and the effective date. 1 further paragraph(s) were left out because their OCR is too corrupt to quote. Verbatim from the operative section of this order, re-extracted 2026-07-26; whitespace normalised only. [moved from the text 2026-09-14]
9 verbatim requirements from 4th Circuit Administrative Order 1997-10.
6 verbatim requirements from 4th Circuit Administrative Order 1997-13.