Jury Appeal

A new study, just published in Neuron magazine, tells us something we suspected but had no previous scientific backing.  We remember items that surprise us more readily than the mundane or expected. During our witness preparation sessions we thought finding surprising pieces of testimony would make the testimony more easily remembered, now we have some proof of this process.

When you are talking to your witnesses, it is easy to simply reject some things they remember as not relevant to the case, but you shouldn’t do that automatically.  If this part of the testimony is surprising or non-intuitive you might want to keep it in to help jurors remember the testimony.  If you really want to add sophistication to the testimony, design it to have a key point occur right after a surprising piece of testimony.

Tags: witness Testimony