What are the advantages of plain English jury instructions?
Some advantages of plain English jury instructions include: • By preparing a working outline of disputed factual and legal issues, the judge and trial attorneys avoid the problem of jury charges that are a garbled patchwork of competing submissions by the opposing parties; • Greater attention to the overall structure and character of the charge minimizes redundancies, inconsistencies, and omissions in the instructions; and • Upgrading the quality of jury instructions encourages jurors to consider all of the issues, rather than mistakenly looking to isolated instructions as hit-or-miss guidance on what they are supposed to do.
