Legal Research

"Manipulating Juries, Moral Hypocrisy, and Apologies"

This post was written by StephanieWestAllen: "This article about toying with jurors' emotions is very good, not just for trial lawyers but for anyone, including salespeople, who try to manipulate people's emotions in order to persuade them. You often hear sales trainers teaching their students to go for the prospective buyer's pain or fear, because, when a person is in pain or scared, they are more likely to buy a solution (which, of course, the salesperson is selling). This may not be a very good piece of advice. One point of this article from The Jury Expert is that you cannot predict what will happen when you get someone to feel an emotion.

From "Unintended Consequences of Toying with Jurors' Emotions: The Impact of Disturbing Emotional Evidence on Jurors' Verdicts""

Despite the legal system's conventional story that our judicial process is devoid of emotions and based on pure reason (Bandes, 1999), attorneys have intuited the role of emotion in jurors' verdict decisions. Attorneys attempt to elicit emotions in jurors during opening and closing statements, or through the use of emotionally disturbing evidence. These attempts might, however, cause unintended changes to the way jurors process or interpret trial evidence..."

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Source: idealawg, 20 March 2010, reproduced with permission of the author.

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on March 22, 2010 (boomark / email).