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The jury watches everything the client and the lawyer do.

By Marks & Katz, LLC

Courthouses and courthouse procedures expose parties and their lawyers to being seen and heard by the juries doing things they do not intend to be seen and heard doing, including conversation in restrooms, criminal defendants in chains before being brought to the courtroom, and parties and their lawyers looking disengaged from the jurors.  The jurors are required to drop their own lives to sit through often boring-seeming proceedings, often for an insulting payment amount that might defray some mileage and buy a bag of chips and a bottle of water. If the jurors do not see the parties and their lawyers taking their roles seriously, treating each other respectfully, caring about the jurors and engaging the jurors, why should the jurors be expected to invest all their mental and physical energies to watching and listening to evidence, deliberating, and reaching a fair decision in the case?  Thanks to my brother criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett for writing about the criminal defendant who looked totally detached from his potential jury panel, which impression may have been enhanced by his listening to an interpreter through headphones...continue to full post

Full post as published by Underdog on April 07, 2009 (boomark / email).