Defense lawyers urged to "KISS": study

TORONTO, July 18 (Reuters Life!) - Lawyers who "KISS" as in "keep it simple, stupid" when it comes to defending their clients are more likely to win in court, according to a study.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and University of Southern California found that defendants in child abuse cases were twice as likely to be convicted if their lawyers used complicated sentence structure when interrogating victims.

"Perceptions of unjust questioning may lead jury members to feel protective of, or empathetic towards, the child witness," lead researcher Angela Evans, a Ph.D. psychology candidate at the University of Toronto said in an interview on Friday.

"Rather than confusing child witnesses and making them look less reliable, complex questions may result in jury members wanting to protect the child witness."

The paper, published in the American Psychological Association's journal of Law and Human Behavior, looked at 223 child sex abuse trials in Los Angeles between 1997 and 2001 and selected 46 transcripts split evenly by matching ages and outcome.

The complexity of the language used in the trials was determined by an automated, linguistic software that analyzed the number of noun and verb phrases within a sentence. The more nouns and verb phrases, the more complicated the sentence.

The software gave good marks to the phrasing: "Do you recall testifying in April and saying that your mother cleaned up after you threw up?"

But found this: "Do you recall telling us that your mother had cleaned up after you throwing up back in April when you testified?" too complex.

Lawyers who used the more complex language were twice as likely to lose their case.

"In terms of child witness cases, it's extremely applicable but it would be something that we would have to investigate further to determine whether it would also be applicable for adult witnesses or other vulnerable populations," Evans said.

The study found that the phrasing used by prosecutors was inconsequential to the outcome of the trials.

The researchers also used the study, funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health, to come up with an equation for predicting the outcome of trials with an 83 percent accuracy rate.

Using the techniques to analyze the transcript of the 2005 Michael Jackson child abuse case in which the star was accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy, the software program predicted the not guilty verdict with a 90 percent accuracy rate.

(Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)