quote:"That's our main job. We take a set of facts, and we tell a story that includes them all and doesn't leave out or contradict a one of them. The other fellow's lawyer then takes the same facts and tells a different story. And the jury believes one story or they believe the other."
This is exactly what I set out to do. My advocacy professor last year was big on the story. I tried to take as many of the prosecution's facts as I could and create two plausible tales that accounted for them without including my client's involvement with the arson. One was that it wasn't arson at all, and one was that if it was arson, my client wasn't involved. The hard part was doing this without having one weaken the other.
The side benefit was that it kept the jury from considering everything together - the evidence of my client's motives and his involvement can lend credence to the fact that it was arson, but I think I kept the jury from considering them together.
Basically, it was "Here is a doubt. Here's the reason for the doubt." I let them turn that into reasonable doubt themselves. Here's what was on my last powerpoint slide:
Was the fire started by accident? The state’s own evidence says it could have been.
Did two intelligent people plan arson in front of a witness (who, incidentally, is very, very angry with Mr. Jackson)?
Is Sonia Peterson lying to avoid 10 to 25 years in prison? She says she has in the past.
I was taking advantage of two things: One, the jury was undergraduates doing a class assignment. I predicted they would give more weight to the reasonable doubt standard than a normal jury. Second, they had limited deliberation time, so there was less chance they would consider both aspects of the case together. The first is something I would do in a real trial - consider the jury and how they would react. The second isn't, but I only had 12 minutes for closing, so I had to cut something.
quote:Do you think this is a weakness in our jury system?
I don't, actually. There's a reason we don't use lawyers or judges for fact finding. They're a very jaded lot. The illogical argument was a direct appeal to emotion - do we want to send a man to prison for at least 10 years on the word of a woman who admits lying under oath to avoid the same fate, and who got the deal of a lifetime avoiding all jail?
That's a legitimate basis for a not guilty finding, and the illogical aspect was merely how I communicated that. Basically, I went through her testimony from the previous trial line by line and asked her, "Was this the truth?" or "Was this a lie?", depending on whether I needed that line as evidence for my own argument. So I got her to testify that she was lying when she said she didn't do it. This means I deliberately elicited testimony that my client was guilty.
Here's why it worked: She had already given the testimony that my client was guilty. That ship had sailed. All I needed to do was making them not believe her.
The lawyers saw the consequence of the fact admitted into evidence (defendant is guilty). The jury saw her saying "I lied" about 50 times.
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You're absolutely right about the shackles and cuffs. It's also why stun belts shouldn't be placed on defendants in the presence of the jury - no one can help but look uncomfortable knowing they could be shocked by the press of a button.
It's the juries job to decide on the credibility of each witness. This almost requires the use of gut hunches - there's a lot more to credibility than the plausibility of the testimony.
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*snorts* Yeah well, considering the fiasco in Atlanta, I'm not so sure violent offenders will show up in court sans shackles and stun belts anymore.
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Come on. The fiasco in Atlanta could have been easily prevented if that guy was adequately covered during transport.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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There were a lot of places where the system broke down - but considering the charges for which he was being accused, I don't think shackles would have been out of line.
If the court is still worried about public perception, sit him in a chair, shackle him to the chair and then seat the jury.
And while I agree the system needs a serious evaluation, the cheapest functional solution would be to keep offenders securely detained without having to rely on enlightened self-interest to ensure good behavior.
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As far as I know, the main one was that he was left alone with one middle-aged woman.
I'm not saying that concerns for safety aren't valid, but as far as I know, lapses are pretty rare, are they not? If that is the case, why fix what ain't broken and will just adversely effect the trial for every defendant?
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Inside the courthouse? That and nobody was monitoring the security cameras. Training and personnel issues again.
One middle-aged woman who, I'm going to guess, wasn't especially well trained in hand-to-hand combat or prisoner control. That's a personnel and training issue.
Allowing a man under arrest for the savage beating of a woman to remain under the sole attention of a woman who, if I remember the quality of deputies in the court house, would be hard pressed to maintain control over unruly children never mind a full grown, violent man.
And that singular lapse resulted in four deaths that could have been avoided had the prisoner been properly secured in transit.
I'm saying the system is broken and this is just the largest "oops" to slip through the cracks.
In our competitions this year I only made one big mistake. I um... argued... with the judge. So it docked our team about 7 points, but I won the argument, that's what's important, right? (Actually, anyone would tell you, it was the judge who started it.)
Yeah, sounds like you did great, I want to do mock trial again. Just not with a particular judge. (She broke almost every rule I can think of to have the other team win. She walked off before she let us have a rebuttal, she was instructing the other team how to do things, she didn't stay for questioning, she was only watching the other team, she just... was really biased against us. But that may be because we were up against a private school, so they had to win with name, not skill.)
You have another competition as prosecution, Dagonee?
Posts: 1831 | Registered: Jan 2003
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No, this was a class, and there's only one jury trial. We did a bench trial a couple weeks ago (a civil matter), and I was on the plaintiff team. But this time I was solo and got to choose the strategy by myself.
Our professor is very even-handed. He was a federal prosecutor for a long time and now is in private practice. He teaches trial advocacy each spring semester, driving down from DC once a week.
I remember a couple of unfair judges in policy debate, and it was very hard to get over.
quote: Goodness, is it time for NITA already?
Good ol' Nita City. A lot of bad stuff goes down there.
Next year I'm going to try to take a winter term trial advocacy class - 2 weeks full time, run by NITA. And it's 2 credits I don't have to take during the normal semester.
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