Several high-profile defendants have opted to testify in their own defense lately, with mixed results. There are several factors to consider before putting a defendant on the witness stand
. A tangle of factors may be behind why the latest high-profile defendants are now choosing to testify, experts say. But doing so may not be as rare or as helpful as people think.About 50% of defendants generally testify in their own criminal trials, according to Jeffrey Bellin, a William & Mary Law School professor and jury researcher. There are many reasons why, including the nature of the criminal charge.
In this screen grab from video, former Brooklyn Center, Minn. police officer Kim Potter breaks down while describing for a jury the seconds in which Daunte Wright was shot dead during a traffic stop in April 2021. Potter, testifying Dec. 17 in her manslaughter trial in Minneapolis, says she accidentally grabbed her gun instead of her taser.
Such implicit bias leads many defendants of color to stay quiet, according to Martín Sabelli, a San Francisco-based criminal defense attorney and president of the. Sabelli says his clients, particularly those accused of gang-related charges, rarely take the stand because they believe jurors might make assumptions about them based on their race.
Ultimately, the fear of facing intense scrutiny and the possibility of coming off as a liar or unlikable plays a major role. “It can go terribly wrong,” Bellin says. “It’s such a big moment for the trial, and if it doesn’t go right, you can do a lot of damage.” “A common intuition that jurors have is that if you’re innocent, you should want to say so,” Bellin says. His study also found that jurors convict more readily when they learn from cross-examinations that a defendant has a prior criminal record.
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