Can Power Point Prejudice Juries?

expriest writes "Recently, Slashdot considered the issue of e-courts which allow electronic filing of documents and court proceedings to be viewed on flat screens. Some commentators, however, are now questioning the effect of more commonplace technology on the courtroom, Power Point." Below, a bit on the reasoning behind their objections to electronic showmanship in the courtroom.

expriest continues "Theoretically, all trials feature two equally zealous advocates who each forcefully advocate for their clients. The idea is that by giving each litigant a powerful and equally persuasive advocate as their attorney, they will cancel each other out and the truth will be left in the shakeup. But what happens when one attorney uses technology to gain an unfair advantage?

Already one court, the Court of Appeals of Washington, held in State v. Robinson that the prosecution should not have been allowed to use Power Point in their closing argument, for fear that the jury would be move convinced by fancy graphics than by actual evidence.

Trial graphics companies are already a boom industry, with businesses like Trial Image making millions off of lawyers struggling to reduce their case to a picture. The question is, how far should this go? Does even simple technology like Power Point reduce trials to a contest of presentation, not a contest of facts and law?"

Comments

Computer Presentation

[I_Love_Pocky!]

Well I for one would laugh if they single out "Power Point." Last time I checked that was just one of many different computer presentation programs. Or perhaps they are suggesting that Microsoft has special skills at warping the legal system?

Re:What this seems to be

[Otter]

I could explain, but I get the impression you're going to come back with an endless stream of analogy about how clip art in a graphical presentation is just like verbal pictures in an oral address and...

Fine. I'm not the one arguing these claims in court -- I just bothered to RTFA and am trying to explain what issues are being raised, as opposed to the karma whores yapping about how this is an attack on PowerPoint (TM) specifically.

Re:Rediculous

[david duncan scott]

I suspect that if you were a wrongfully-accused defendant, you'd be in favor of any and every means of presenting your defense, and why the hell not?

Presentation software isn't any more hypnotic than graphs and charts. I can't see where only allowing flip charts drawn by hand will do anything but favor the side with access to better graphic artists -- at least presentation software (PowerPoint, OpenOffice, or whatever) is within the means of any law firm with a PC.

Besides, I've been on a jury, and contrary to apparent popular belief the little stick-on "JUROR" badge does not immediately render one a drooling idiot -- Jury Duty was not a documentary. I found that my fellow jurors were at least as bright and reasonable as most people I've met, and a good deal more thoughtful than many. We all listened carefully, took our work seriously, and rendered what we believed to be a fair decision (which may be why we ended hung -- we split somewhere around 7-5.) I think most of that group had seen bullet charts before, and I doubt we would have been especially moved if the defendant had brought in pony rides, or if the state had put on a chorus line (although I've always found Esther Williams swimming extravaganzas to be very persuasive, especially with regard to fingerprint evidence.)

Re:What this seems to be

[bedessen]

It differs because it's synthetic. It's created by the attorney to be as persuasive as possible. Contrast a police photo of the crime scene with the attorney pointing to various locations and verbally explaining his version of the incident to a 3-D CGI rendered "flyby" of the scene with all sorts of re-enactment style "he was standing here", "he meant to shoot here", "it might have looked like this" annotations. With a high enough budget those things can tend to look like Hollywood movie versions of reality. In other words, you can twist reality by artificially implying that because some fancy 3-D rendition of a scene went some way, then it must have gone that way in reality. The jury and judge should be exposed to neutral evidence, such as what is collected by the police investigators, and not have the full computer graphics arsenal of tools that can put many different spins on reality. If you want to demonstrate how the bullet pierced the man's artery, for example, then find a medical textbook that shows the artery, blow it up, and have the medical expert witness point to it as he testifies. If you allow attorneys the ability to generate extravagent computer-generated recreations then they will find all sorts of ways of being as persuasive as possible - and thus prejudice the jury.

Note that I don't think a plain PowerPoint presentation consisting of only text necessarily has this capability, I'm more referring to the third point above of calling anything graphical and flashy "PowerPoint."