Lawyers and judges should start learning more about video production and psychology to better understand how juries perceive information that is presented to them in a trial.

That's the general message from Connecticut's Quinnipiac University School of Law professors Neal R. Feigenson and Christina O. Spiesel, who have co-written a book that explores the use of technology in the courtroom and its effect on jurors, judges and attorneys. The book, "Law on Display: The Digital Transformation of Legal Persuasion and Judgment" was released last month and is an outgrowth of a course the duo teaches on visual persuasion and the law.

The upshot is that lawyers have ready access to tools that can help them create multimedia presentations in the courtroom. Studies have shown those presentations to be more influential than oral presentations, especially in complicated cases.

But because of editing capabilities and software that creates virtual reality animation, for instance, there can be concerns about multimedia evidence walking the line between being helpful and being misleading.

"[Multi-media presentations] are believable, powerful, useful and a problem, all at once," said Spiesel, who also is a digital artist. "This is not about forbidding their use in court but understanding how they fit into the legal system. It's an adventurous time."

Feigenson said that among the bar and the bench, there's a wide range of understanding of the technology involved in creating presentations that often meld video, audio and images to assist lawyers in making their case.

"We wanted to increase the literacy of digital media," said Feigenson. "The main issue is how these presentations do something that people aren't aware of."

And that's where the psychology comes into play. Since the early 1990s, Feigenson has researched and written about the connection between psychology and the law; he wrote a previous book that delves into the psychology of juries deciding accident cases.

When it comes to visual presentations in the courtroom, the most basic point is that humans are able to understand an image quicker than they are the written word, the authors said. It's why some lawyers have been turning to computer modeling and visual aids to help explain everything from complex intellectual property matters to providing concise timelines in criminal matters.

"Our brains are wired to process images," Feigenson said. "It's easier to get the gist of a picture than the gist of a word string."

LOSS OF CONTROL

That means there's opportunity to produce impactful presentations, even with basic software such as Microsoft's PowerPoint and Apple's Keynote. A good-quality video production set-up costs about $5,000, Spiesel said.

And if attorneys don't have a general sense of what can be done with the technology, they can find themselves in trouble, Spiesel said. "The danger is loss of control over how people understand the case," she said. "If you don't know what the visuals are saying to other people, you don't have control over the message."

Along with a primer on images and psychology, the professors' book highlights several cases around the country where digital presentations enhanced a person's case.

One was a police brutality case in Hartford in which the officer, Robert Murtha, said he shot at a fleeing suspect because Murtha thought his life was in danger. Video surveillance from a police car didn't support his story, so his lawyers created animation that showed Murtha's side of the story, rather than relying on verbal testimony.

"The jury had the opportunity to see what Murtha thought," Feigenson said, and Murtha was eventually acquitted. The wrinkle was that Murtha's animated portion was merged with the actual police surveillance video and didn't include any disclaimer that the animation was not actual footage, Feigenson noted.

While some jurors may be able to differentiate between the two types of visuals in that instance, technological advances can blur those lines, Spiesel said.

"The quality of available animation has really gone up," she said. "We see it in video games. The animation is drawing closer to highly realistic outputs and those images can really pull people in."

And that's important, Feigenson said, because from a psychological standpoint, when images look like reality, "they're more believable because they're familiar."

ZOOMING IN

Presentations don't have to include any bells and whistles to create interesting questions about how to properly display evidence.

Feigenson pointed to a Michigan case from the 1990s where a court ruled that the plaintiffs lawyer couldn't zoom in on an X-ray to show a small spot, which was a cancerous tumor, that the defendant physician failed to discover.

"The court said that changed the meaning and value of the picture to the jury," Feigenson said, because the zoomed-in X-ray showed the spot to be much larger than it actually was.

That played into a psychological bias similar to hindsight, Feigenson noted.

"Once they see that picture [of the enlarged spot], people tend to overestimate whether a responsible physician should have detected the tumor."

Today, images can be altered with readily available software such as PhotoShop, creating challenges for judges. Spiesel said that's why lawyers who prepare multimedia presentations should document every step of how a picture was produced.

Judges also should be prepared to encounter such evidence, she noted.

"It's not that judges need to know everything [about digital imagery]," Spiesel said, "but they need to know that they need to ask questions and then make judgment calls about admissibility."

Subscribe to The Connecticut Law Tribune