PUTTING JURY IN YOUR SHOESAuthor(s): Paul MarcotteSource: ABA Journal, Vol. 73, No. 9 (JULY 1, 1987), p. 20Published by: American Bar AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20759385 .

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News

PUTTING JURY M YOUR SHOES If a picture is worth a thousand

words, video in the courtroom can be worth millions of dollars. Lawyers in civil cases and criminal prosecutors now frequently let highly convincing videotapes and computer-generated animation tell their stories for them. For example:

Videotapes from the cockpit of a Lear jet that was put through a dif ficult series of maneuvers helped convince jurors that a fatal 1978 Lear jet crash near Vickery, Ohio, was not caused by a design defect.

In Louisville, Ky., the Ralston Purina Company settled multi-mil lion dollar lawsuits after plaintiffs produced a computer-generated ani

mation showing how hexane gas, re

leased from a soybean processing center, entered the city's sewer sys tem in 1981 and caused a large explo sion.

Eight defendants in a Chicago drug conspiracy case were recently found guilty after the federal jury saw and heard the drug transactions on

tapes supplied by the FBI.

SEEING IS BELIEVING Letting jurors see and experi

ence what you are telling them goes a long way toward winning your case. That was the message lawyers heard at an April trial practice committee meeting of the ABA's Litigation Sec tion in Chicago.

While videotape has been used in courtrooms for years, and com

puter animation is gaining more ac

ceptance, few lawyers realize the potential power of this evidence? until they come up against it them selves.

John Martindale, an attorney with Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan, & Aronoff in Cleveland, said videotapes were crucial to its defense of the Gates Lear Jet company in the Ohio crash.

Experts on both sides disputed the capabilities of the Model 25 Lear jet to recover from certain runaway trim maneuvers and steep descents.

The defense introduced into evi dence three synchronized videotapes which put the jury in the cockpit by showing a pilot successfully recover

ing from those types of maneuvers. One camera was focused on the

pilot's instrument panel, another looked out the front windscreen, and a third was positioned in a chase plane. "What those tapes handled, was a simple, central issue of credi bility," said Martindale.

In the Louisville sewer explosion case, the computer-generated ani

mation was the "single piece of evi dence which effectively summarized what happened," said Victor Mad dox, an attorney with the Louisville firm Brown, Todd & Heyburn, which represented the sewer district.

The animation is believed to have helped induce settlements with the sewer district shortly before trial and with private plaintiffs after it was shown to the jury.

At trial, the plaintiffs' expert witness testified for several days, de tailing the plant's hexane gas con tainment area and describing how the gas escaped. The narrated animation was then used to summarize and il lustrate the accident.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE "What computer animation can

do is take you to impossible places, show you things that would nor mally be impossible to show, too costly to show, and possibly too dan gerous," said Robert Seltzer, presi dent of Graphic Evidence, the Los Angeles company that produced the animation.

U.S. District Judge Charles Ko coras of Chicago, who presided over the drug conspiracy trial, said video tapes are sometimes invaluable to prosecutors who have credibility problems with their witnesses.

"Where the government has either videotape evidence or audi otape evidence, those words and pic tures really can't be changed.

"You can argue about their meaning. You can argue about their intent. But if the words and pictures are strong enough, the focus of the trial comes to that, and not so much on how dirty the accomplice is," said Kocoras.

What can you do when your op ponent wants to introduce this type of potent evidence? During discov ery, look at the videotape carefully and examine the outtakes, suggested Fred Heller, president of Heller As sociates, Ltd., in New York, which has produced dozens of videotapes for lawyers.

While lawyers may go over a deposition word by word, they don't take as much care with this poten tially more effective evidence, ac cording to Heller. The medium can shape the message, he said, analog izing to a writer's use of punctuation for emphasis.

"The closeup is the underlining of the text. The zoom is the expla nation point. The fadeout could be the period. How they are used, and their frequency, can mean that technique is playing a major role," said Heller.

?Paul Marcotte

Slides from the videotape that Lear Jet used to prove its plane did not cause a fatal crash.

20 ABA JOURNAL / JULY 1, 1987

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