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Full-Text Articles in Evidence

Hiding The Elephant (How The Psychological Techniques Of Magicians Can Be Used To Manipulate Witnesses At Trial), Sydney A. Beckman Aug 2014

Hiding The Elephant (How The Psychological Techniques Of Magicians Can Be Used To Manipulate Witnesses At Trial), Sydney A. Beckman

Sydney A. Beckman

In 1917 Harry Houdini performed a single, yet incredible, illusion; “[u]nder the bright spotlights of New York’s Theatre Hippodrome, he made a live elephant disappear.” In 1983 David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty Disappear in front of both a live and a national television audience. To be sure, neither the elephant nor Lady Liberty actually disappeared. But from the perspective of the audience they did, indeed, disappear. So which is correct? Did they, or didn’t they?

Trial Lawyers and Magicians share many of the same talents and skills. Misdirection, misinformation, selective-attention, ambiguity, verbal manipulation, body language interpretation, and physical …


Rationality, Insanity, And The Insanity Defense: Reflections On The Limits Of Reason, Theodore Y. Blumoff Mar 2014

Rationality, Insanity, And The Insanity Defense: Reflections On The Limits Of Reason, Theodore Y. Blumoff

Theodore Y. Blumoff

Individuals who suffer from chronic paranoid ideations live with deeply embedded conspiratorial delusions that are sometimes accompanied by unwanted visual and/or auditory stimuli, sometime neither: just psychotic delusions in which they feel as if they have lost control of their lives – and of course they have, albeit not from the performances of foreign forces. When those perceived forces persevere for even a fairly short period of time, they can dictate the performance of evil deeds that the individual ultimately feels helpless to oppose. What observations and findings from neuroscience make clear is that such individuals do not lack knowledge, …


Tell Us A Story, But Don't Make It A Good One: Resolving The Confusion Regarding Emotional Stories And Federal Rule Of Evidence 403, Cathren Page Feb 2014

Tell Us A Story, But Don't Make It A Good One: Resolving The Confusion Regarding Emotional Stories And Federal Rule Of Evidence 403, Cathren Page

Cathren Page

Abstract: Tell Us a Story, But Don’t Make It A Good One: Resolving the Confusion Regarding Emotional Stories and Federal Rule of Evidence 403 by Cathren Koehlert-Page Courts need to reword their opinions regarding Rule 403 to address the tension between the advice to tell an emotionally evocative story at trial and the notion that evidence can be excluded if it is too emotional. In the murder mystery Mystic River, Dave Boyle is kidnapped in the beginning. The audience feels empathy for Dave who as an adult becomes one of the main suspects in the murder of his friend Jimmy’s …