Telling Tales in Court: Trial Procedure and the Story Model

There are three ways in which stories may figure prominently at trials. First, litigants may tell stories to jurors. Not only is there some social science evidence that this happens, but trial lawyers have an instinctive sense that this is what they do. Ask a litigator to describe a current case and she is likely to reply, Our story is ... Second, jurors may try to make sense of the evidence they receive by fitting it to some story pattern. If so, the process is likely to feed back on itself. That is, jurors are likely to build a story based on the evidence given them, and the evidence that best fits a juror\u27s preferred story is likely to be given special weight while contradictory evidence is discounted or disregarded. Third, the jury as a group may try to arrive at a collective story in the process of reaching a verdict.\u27 While no one to my knowledge has systematically examined mock jury deliberations to see if the process resembles an effort to arrive at a collective story of what occurred, this seems to be a plausible interpretation of what at least sometimes happens