The “laying on of hands” can resonate powerfully. In my background, it has spiritual and theological implications as a ritual of blessing or of healing. Can this and other senses beyond sight and hearing also be part of legitimate trial advocacy in conveying truth to jurors?
The Georgia Court of Appeals recently said yes in the context of a case where two experts disagreed on whether there was a difference in temperature of the hands of a plaintiff who had a diagnosis of complex regional pain syndrome (also known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy), due to medical malpractice. (Kudos to Lloyd Bell who ably tried the case and called me to brainstorm about this while the appeal was pending.)
In Piedmont Newnan Hosp., Inc. v. Barbour, — S.E.2d —-, 2015 WL 4316873 (Ga.App.,2015), decided on July 16, 2015, the trial judge allowed jurors to feel the hands of the plaintiff to decide whether there was a difference in temperature. The plaintiff’s expert had testified that such a difference in temperature between the hands was a diagnostic criteria for CRPS. The defense expert said there was no such difference in temperature. The judge let jurors hold the hands and decide for themselves whether there was a temperature differential. The result was a substantial verdict for the plaintiff.
On appeal, the court rejected defense arguments that the trial judge abused his discretion by allowing jurors to make a medical diagnosis, that it made them witnesses who could not be cross-examined, that the exercise had no probative value, and that such a practice has been rejected by other courts around the country.
Federal Rule of Evidence 401 (O.C.G.A. § 24–4–401) states that relevant evidence is evidence that has “any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.” Temperature of the hands was indisputably relevant to deciding whether the plaintiff had CRPS.
The court discussed cases from other states in which jurors were allowed to use touch, taste and smell to determine facts. This included cases where they were allowed to feel a lump in a plaintiff’s arm, fractured skull, arms and legs to determine temperature differentials, and other body parts. The court also cited favorably two old Georgia moonshine cases, Union v. State, 7 Ga.App. 27, 27(4), 66 S.E. 24 (1909) (no error if jurors tasted liquid from jug admitted into evidence in illegal whiskey trial); Morse v. State, 10 Ga.App. 61, 63(3), 72 S.E. 534 (1911) (jurors may utilize all of their senses, including taste and smell, in determining whether liquid was an intoxicating liquor).
What are the implications of this ruling for trial advocacy? How else can lawyers find ways to allow jurors to use all their senses in the search for truth? And how much would be too much, overreaching to the point of turning off judges and jurors?
Consider all the senses and think outside the box. Traditionally, we think of “five senses” — sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste – a short list credited to Aristotle. But researchers now have expanded the list to 21 senses:
- Sight: This really includes is two types of seeing based on two distinct types of receptors present, one for color (cones) and one for brightness (rods).
- Taste: Again, this may be broken down into five types of taste based on different taste receptors — sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. The taste sense, unlike sight, is a sense based off of a chemical reaction. “Umani” is Japanese for pleasant savory taste, when receptors detect the amino acid glutamate, generally found in meat and some artificial flavoring.
- Smell: Like taste, the sense of smell involves olfactory sensors that work off of a chemical reaction. Smell combines with taste to produce flavors. Olfactory memory can be powerful and closely linked to deep emotional response. Think of how often your own memories are linked to smells – cookies baking in your grandmother’s kitchen, the smells of nature in a favorite place, etc.
- Touch: This involves four distinct types of touch sensors perceiving pressure, temperature, pain, and itching.
- Thermoception: Apart from sense of temperature on touch, this is the ability to sense heat and cold in the environment and internally in the body. It involves hot and cold receptors and a distinct brain function.
- Sound: People with normal hearing detect vibrations along some medium, such as air or water that is in contact with ear drums.
- Proprioception: This sense gives you the ability to tell where your body parts are, relative to other body parts.
- Tension Sensors: Receptors in muscles allow the brain the ability to monitor muscle tension.
- Nociception (pain): In the past, pain was though to be just the result of overloading other senses, such as “touch.” But now it is considered its own unique sensory system. There are three distinct types of pain receptors: cutaneous (skin), somatic (bones and joints), and visceral (body organs).
- Equilibrioception (balance): The sense that allows you to keep your balance and sense body movement in terms of acceleration and directional changes. This sense also allows for perceiving gravity. The sensory system for this is found in your inner ears and is called the vestibular labyrinthine system. But some people who have lost both vestibular nerves, and thus do not have this sense at all, are able to compensate admirably by use of visual cues. For example, my daughter lost both auditory and vestibular nerves in the removal of neurofibromatosis tumors but has been able to complete triathlons. How do you swim over a mile, bike over 50 miles and then run a half marathon, with no sense of balance? Doctors at Harvard included her in a study to figure it out.
- Stretch Receptors: These are found in such places as the lungs, bladder, stomach, and the gastrointestinal tract. A type of stretch receptor, that senses dilation of blood vessels, is also often involved in headaches.
- Chemoreceptors: An area of the medulla in the brain detects blood born hormones and drugs and controls the vomiting reflex.
- Thirst: This monitors hydration and tells us when we need something to drink.
- Hunger: We are all quite familiar with this one.
- Magnetoception: This is the ability to detect magnetic fields, which is principally useful in providing a sense of direction when detecting the Earth’s magnetic field. Humans don’t have as much of this as birds that migrate following magnetic fields. But humans do have some sense of magnetoception, though it is poorly understood.
- Time: Human perception of time varies widely, and may be more accurate when people are younger rather than older. People with brain damage often lose the ability to keep track of time. Others seem to have a biological alarm clock and habitually wake up ten minutes before the time they set on an electronic or mechanical alarm clock. Researchers have determined that the mechanism we use for sensing time involves the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia.
I am not smart enough to immediately think of appropriate ways to employ all these senses of jurors in trial advocacy. However, here are a few examples both commonplace and slightly outside of customary usage. Any lawyer tempted to try techniques that are not customary should seek the judge’s permission in advance and have a trial memorandum to show the judge that it really is OK to allow a slightly unconventional demonstrative aid.
- Smell. Olfactory memory can be emotionally powerful and a tremendous tool in persuasion.
- Alcohol. If alcohol is at issue, one could use containers of the type of alcohol involved as demonstrative aids during closing argument, open and pour them while talking, thus filling the courtroom with the smell of beer or whiskey. I tried this in a mock trial at the Ultimate Trial Advocacy Course at Harvard years ago, but have never had the right occasion to try it in court.
- Drugs. I started out as a prosecutor. It was not unusual to have officers testify about the smell of drug contraband. One could also give jurors the opportunity to smell a bag of marijuana, for example, as jurors were allowed to taste moonshine in old Georgia cases.
- Charred materials. We sometimes have cases in which vehicles burned and the contents have smoky, charred aroma. A customary response is to just get photos of those things and keep the nasty smells out of our files and offices. But introduction into evidence of smelly remains from fires could powerfully reinforce the reality of the fire.
- Chemicals. Where appropriate and with suitable precautions, jurors could be allowed to smell brake fluid, gasoline and other chemical that are involved in a case.
- Touch. As in cases cited by the Court of Appeals in Barbour, jurors may be invited to lay hands on the injured person to confirm aspects of any injury tactilely as well as visually. A possible side effect may be in forming a connection between jurors and the person they actually touch.
- Rough scars. Discoloration from a laceration or burn may fade, but the skin remains uneven, bumpy or of an unnatural texture.
- Unevenly healed fractures. Even when bones knit together, there may be a palpable lumpiness at the fracture site. Jurors could feel that.
- Medical implants. If an injured person has some sort of medical implant palpable from the outside – plates and screws in an arm or leg, screws securing a rod in a femur, feeding tube, port for chemo, etc. – jurors might be invited to feel from the outside what is visible only on radiology images.
Perhaps lawyers more creative than I will think of ways to use others of those many senses for communicating the truth to jurors at trial. In doing so, however, lawyers should take care not to just develop a “bag of tricks” but to employ all the senses as a means of communicating truth.
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Ken Shigley is an Atlanta trial attorney focused on serious personal injury and wrongful death cases. He is currently chair of the American Association for Justice Motor Vehicle Collision, Highway & Premises Liability Section. Previously he served as president of the State Bar of Georgia and chair of the board of trustees of the Institute for Continuing Legal Education in Georgia. He is lead author of Georgia Law of Torts: Trial Preparation and Practice and a board certified civil trial attorney of the National Board of Trial Advocacy.