Defending People

the tao of criminal-defense trial lawyering

Trial Technologies Reading List 1

My explicit exploration of alternative trial technologies started, believe it or not, with “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists” (Neil Strauss). Jennifer bought it for my dad, and it was such a well-packaged book (black leatherette binding with red ribbon page marker, like a Bible) that I read through it. Reading it, I thought “what works to pick up women should work to influence juries. This led me to “Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming” (Richard Bandler, John Grinder). I had read about hypnotist Milton Erickson, so I went back from NLP to “My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.” (W. W. Norton & Company). I bought and explored a stack of other NLP / hypnosis books, but these are the ones that I recommend as a starting point for an exploration of deliberate induction of trance states.

I say “deliberate” because the common element among the most effective argument, the most effective cross-examination, and the most effective direct examination is that at least one participant in each case is in a trance, even unintentionally. Even though we often notice it, we generally don’t recognize it as a trance — for example, we see a lawyer who is giving the argument of his life, and we say that he is “in the zone.”

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Share

About The Author

Mark Bennett got his letter of marque from the Supreme Court of Texas in May 1995. He is famous for having no sense of humor when it comes to totalitarianism.

Comments

Leave a non-anonymous Reply

Bad Behavior has blocked 2454 access attempts in the last 7 days.