I am also promoting a book entitled “Voir Dire and Summation”, which teaches the best closing arguments and jury selection techniques and strategies.

Feel free to check it out at http://www.voirdiresummation.com

Strive to do you best today,

Ray

Love the tips. I’m a prosecutor in the largest local office in the country (hint: we’re located in southern california).

Although some colleagues shun visual aids, I emphatically embrace them. Every opportunity I have to use a visual aid to enhance my presentation I do it. However, one of my great mentors shared a tip with me, that I continue to use to this day, and I’m curious what your feeling is on it.

My mentors view is that jurors are like 3rd graders — and 3rd graders need to hear the same information 3 times, and, ideally, in 3 different ways. Therefore, I’ll often do my entire direct examination, and ask people to tell us what happened, and describe where they were.

Once that’s done, I’ll often — in practicality — redo the examination, but this time with visual aids. I find it focuses things, the jury gets to hear it twice, and it also helps me to recall a few details I left out of my “initial” examination. I suppose this could bore some jurors, but, on the other hand, I think it’s more clear to those who don’t process information as quickly as the brightest jurors.

With one exception, the jurors have told me over and over again, that the visual aids were quite useful to them and they were able to begin their deliberations with a much more clear view of the facts.

Finally, one other aspect I didn’t hear you mention — actually marking the exhibits. While I use the usual “I hold in my hand a sheet of paper that appears to have a photo of bloody head of a female. . . ” and then I simply ask two questions: “1) do you recognize what’s in that photo; 2) how do you recognize what’s in that photo. . . ” Some of our judges demand we mark it before those questions; some want it marked after. . . as for marking it, I uniformly print P-1 to P-30 on labels, and then peel the stickers off one at a time and put them on the back of my next exhibit. I never need to ask what the next exhibit is, because I simply look at my labels and it’s automatic. The clerk’s appreciate it too, because I never duplicate my exhibit numbers, and she/he can always tell which exhibit number because the sticker is much more clear than some scribble on the back of the page. . .

Your thoughts?

Keep up the great work Elliott!

Yours truly,

Erik Magraken