Lawyers, Liars, and the Art of Storytelling by Jonathan Shapiro

Author:Jonathan Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: American Bar Association
Published: 2016-09-15T04:30:00+00:00

The defense lawyer didn’t hit the jury over the head with it. He let them fill in the blanks, eliciting their outrage rather than mimicking it. The cop was not a hero. He was a racist.

Other lawyers might have spoken longer and destroyed the moment. They would have used the usual boilerplate—the unnecessary introductions, the perfunctory thanks for their jury service—most of which would have already been covered before they spoke by the court. All these lawyers would have conveyed to the jury was that their client had no story at all.

This defense lawyer knew how to tell a story. And it never changed. His cross-examination of the officer consisted of two or three questions, the best one being:

“Why did you assume the robbers were going to drive to East LA?”

The one juror who lived in East LA stared daggers at me. From thin soil the defense lawyer was teasing out a fair crop of reasonable doubt.

There were no fingerprints or eyewitnesses linking his client to the actual bank robbery. Wasn’t it possible his client was just a passenger in the car, along for the ride, uninvolved with the robbery at all?

There was the guilty action of fleeing, but the defense lawyer noted in his closing that the Cadillac did pull over, at least at first. If the men panicked and fled, fearful of the police officer, they had reason to. Look at how the officer endangered the lives of countless innocent people, many of them children, on a hare-brained, dangerous, ego-fuelled joyride. Is this the kind of police work we want to condone?

Everything the man said fit into his story. He had the same facts and law as I had. But he built a clever, consistent, thought-provoking defense with it. He kept the jury out for days.

Eventually, the jury convicted the defendant. But the defense lawyer wrote a better script and told a better story. His guy just happened to be guilty. Justice was done, in that sense. But from a storytelling standpoint, the defense lawyer should have been the winner.

“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,” Damon Runyon said, “but that’s the way to bet.”

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