Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :. Injustice News Twitter Feed :.Mark Bennett | February 15, 2009
This Week, in 2009 and in History
February 9th was the 100th anniversary of the federal “war on drugs”, writes WindyPundit in 100 Years of FAIL. This week South Carolina cops did their part to expose the WOD for a pathetic farce. Radley Balkoff (The Agitator) writes in The Michael Phelps Witch Hunt Gets Surreal:
Richland County, [...]
Mark Bennett | January 27, 2009
The new edition of the American Society of Trial Consultants The Jury Expert is out. I’ll be paying special attention to Gail Herde’s Take Me to Your Leader: An Examination of Authoritarianism as an Indicator of Juror Bias.
I think authoritarianism might be what I’m trying to get at with this scaled jury question; I [...]
Mark Bennett | January 22, 2009
Thanks to an alert Defending People reader, here’s a little more linguistic goodness (following up on Complex Questions and Children) for you today. Here’s Janet Ainsworth’s ‘You have the right to remain silent…’ but only if you ask for it just so: the role of linguistic ideology in American police interrogation law (nothin’ but title!), [...]
Mark Bennett | January 22, 2009
Here is an article (Complex Questions Asked By Defense Lawyers But Not Prosecutors Predicts [sic] Convictions in Child Abuse Trials) from the Journal of Law and Human Behavior describing a study using automated linguistic analysis finding that the complexity of the questions asked by defense counsel in a child sex abuse case predicts the outcome [...]
Mark Bennett | January 15, 2009
Check out Vrij et al., Outsmarting the Liars: The Benefit of Asking Unanticipated Questions (PDF), from Law and Human Behavior (June 2008). Vrij notes that
If investigators interview individual suspects once (with no factual information about the case), they tend to rely more on noverbal cues than verbal cues to detect deceit. However, when investigators [...]
Mark Bennett | January 14, 2009
If you’re not already on Twitter, here’s a good reason to dip your toe into the twitterstream: jury consultant Dennis Elias (twitter name @JuryVox) tweets frequent links to the latest jury research. For example:
The Crime Victim’s Right to Confer with Prosecutors.
Reflections on why we de-humanize our fellow humans. Implications for jury trial.
Advice on judging personality [...]
Mark Bennett | January 9, 2009
A year and a half ago, I wrote:
Walking the halls of the Harris County Criminal Courthouse, I smell
fear. The accused are often afraid, as you might expect, as are their
loved ones, but theirs is not the fear I smell.
The fear I smell oozes out from under doors leading to the judges’
chambers, locked to keep [...]
Mark Bennett | November 19, 2008
I’ve started reading the quarterly magazine of the American Society of Trial Consultants, The Jury Expert. It’s right up Defending People readers’ alley; it’s even subtitled “The Art and Science of Litigation Advocacy. I downloaded a stack of issues to carry in my bag for quiet times; there are several treasures in each volume. If [...]
Mark Bennett | November 14, 2008
Criminal defense trial lawyering
integrates technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences.
Right?
I scavenged the definition from the Wikimedia page [...]
Mark Bennett | August 4, 2008
Last weekend I read Brain Rules, by John Medina. It’s a slender book concisely describing 12 of the principles that govern how our brains work, and suggesting ways that businesses and schools might take advantage of these principles to help employees and students perform and learn better.
As knowledge workers and creative workers, we should be [...]
