In Jury Psychology Can Undermine Plaintiffs’ Expert Witnesses authors Neil Goldberg, John Freedenberg, Joseph Mooney, and Joseph Hanna write that cross examination of plaintiff’s expert witness should be geared to thwart the emotional hijacking of jurors that plaintiffs endeavor to secure. This strategy includes hiring a jury consultant expert witness. In this excerpt they write on anger management.
The adversarial legal system is dependent on the assumptin that decision makers are rational, unbiases, and not strongly predisposed. The plaintiffs’ bar recognizes that this paradigm can be altered by their trial strategy, which can benefit the plaintiff’s case mightily.
In recognition of this fact, the plaintiffs’ bar has developed aggressive discovery initiatives, questioning techniques, order of proof strategies and expert witnes presentations that, among other things, are geared towards capitalizing on the tarnished reputation of Corporate America.
The plainfiff’s goal is to capitalize on the tarnished image of Corporate America, by creating anger and suspicion on the part of the juries toward the defendant, with the arguments developed from the implementation of these stragegies in hand, plantiffs’ counsel angle to generate as much anger against the corporation as they can. They recognize what we all intuitively know from our own experiences; what is rational is of en overcome when anger holds sway. In our own lives, we have all observed time and again how passion overwhelms reason.
Excerpted from Jury Psychology Can Undermine Plaintiffs’ Expert Witnesses, For the Defense, December 2007.