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Continued... Page 7 > Developing a Theme that Sells

In a sense, you are making the jury expand their sense of family to include people who are not blood relations. The tricky part of this is creating and using genuine emotion to convey the theme that is not slick or contrived. The conviction must come from the attorney himself/herself, conveying to the jury their own deepest feelings. Your personal conviction, tone of voice and words and must ìaffectî the jury. The power of the theme starts with the attorney's level of personal conviction.

AN APPEAL TO BASIC HUMANITY: A LESSON FROM SHAKESPEARE AND DARROW

It is often an uphill battle to connect the humanity of the jury to that of the client. Thinking of how to accomplish this goal, it is worthwhile looking at the power of words used by others.

At the time William Shakespeare wrote The Merchant Of Venice , anti-Semitism was well established in England , expressed in a variety of forms in popular entertainments of the day. At best, a Jew was seen in plays as comic relief, at worst, dehumanized to a money grubbing scoundrel. Shakespeare's lines for Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice break through the prejudices of his time and cause the audience to realize Shylock's humanity, that he is a person with the same wants, needs and qualities as the non-Jewish audience:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

One of the greatest trial lawyers of all time, Clarence Darrow, borrowed this same theme in his famous closing argument in the Sweet case in Detroit on May 12, 19 26. In that case, a mob of white citizens gathered outside of the house of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a highly educated African-American physician who had moved with his family into a lower white middle class neighborhood. When shots were fired during the racial unrest of a mob action outside the Sweet home, the 11 people in the Sweet house were immediately arrested and charged with first degree murder. In the subsequent trial, in city polarized by racial tension, Clarence Darrow pounded away at the common connection between all people, regardless of color, securing an acquittal against almost impossible odds:

Dr. Sweet scraped together his small earnings by his industry and put himself through college, and he scraped together his small earnings of $3,000 to buy that home because he wanted to kill somebody? It is silly to talk about it. He bought that home just as you buy yours, because he wanted a home to live in, to take his wife and to raise his family.

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