Whether you follow celebrities, politics, true crime, or just read the news on a regular basis, we are constantly bombarded with coverage about courtroom cases. Unfortunately, this coverage sometimes fails to provide the reader easily digestible content to understand the case. To help remedy this, I’ve put together a short primer to help navigate coverage of the next case you check in about. By looking for some key pieces of information, you should be better able to understand the next case you read about.
The first thing you should look for in the coverage is what the specific legal question was in the case. Judges and juries aren’t responsible for providing answers on who is good or bad, right or wrong. Instead, in every case, there is a very specific legal question that must be answered. For example, the dueling lawsuits between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, despite what some coverage may have conveyed, were not about determine if one, both, or neither parties were a good or bad person, but to instead focus on whether either party had made false allegations about the other. By understand exactly what the court is responsible for deciding, you can better understand the next two keys for reading a case, which are knowing why the judge or jury made their decision and what the outcome means.
Courts don’t simply state who won or lost a case, they often, in some cases more explicitly than in others, will explain why they ruled the way they did. In criminal and civil cases, the explanation for why one side or another won might be due to something called “The standard of proof” — “How confident does the judge or jury have to be that they are right in order to declare one side a winner?” The standard of proof is much higher in a criminal case (Beyond a reasonable doubt) than a civil case (More likely than not) because we demand more proof to give someone a criminal record and place them in prison and/or fine them, compared to civil cases in which one party usually just has to pay money. This difference can help explain why in one case (The people v OJ Simpson) OJ Simpson was found non-guilty and faced no punishment, while in another (Rufo v OJ Simpson) he was held liable and forced to pay compensation to the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. The evidence may have been similar in both cases, but in the civil cases, the standard of proof was easier to meet
In high profile controversial cases before the Supreme Court or other federal courts, understanding why the court made their decision can be especially important. If the court uses a specific logic to decide one case, they are supposed to use that same logic in all similar cases going forward. This is the concept of “precedent”.
The final thing to try to discern from a case is to understand what the decision means going forward. We already discussed above how essential it is to understand in Supreme Court cases why they made their decision, because it will influence all similar cases going forward. In criminal cases we should again pay attention to what the court was supposed to decide. A criminal defendant is never found “innocent,” because innocence is a firm conclusion that someone did not commit a crime. Rather, defendants are found “not guilty” which is a conclusion that the State did not prove strongly enough that the defendant did in fact commit the crime.
Hopefully, by focusing more on what the court was responsible for deciding, why they made their decision, and what their ruling means going forward, you will find yourself better equipped to follow legal stories. And if you find the coverage you are seeing lacks answers to these questions, then you should consider a different source, as they may be more focused on clicks and views than serious coverage.
Christopher Kleps is an Assistant Professor for Sociology and Anthropology as well as Criminal Justice at UW-Green Bay.
