The Nuremberg and Lt. Calley Trial essays

The Nuremberg and Lt. Calley Trial essays Closing Arguments offer the last chance for the lawyer to speak to the court, and represents an effort to impress upon what is important to the jury members before it deliberates. Closing arguments review the evidence presented and sum up for the court what the case has been about and why the case should be decided in one's favor. One should keep in mind the six components articulated by Plato. Introduction; opening statement; refutation, (which is going against the component); digression, (which is a story); peroration (which sums it all up and finally the conclusion, which offers the "therefore" and the "I believe.") In his closing argument, Robert Jackson, the prosecutor at Nuremberg , uses rhetoric argumentation in a manner similar to Plato in The Gorgias and also Aristotles in the Rhetoric. Plato viewed rhetoric as its focus the search of knowledge, truth and justice rather than its purpose "the manufacture of persuasion," or tricking the listener to believe a certain way. Aristotle viewed rhetoric as the skill that is used to discover the means of persuasion. He believed that rhetoric should be guided towards the listener of truth, justice and moral excellence through different ways of persuasion through word usage, pathos and ethos proof. In Jackson's closing arguments his precise usage of words in a sentence and how he delivers the arguments makes the listener be pulled into what he is arguing. Jackson attacks the defendants argument that its war aims were not aggressive and were only intended to protect Germany against danger, eventually, of the "menace of communism" (48). On the "outset of this argument of self-defense fails because it completely ignores this damning combination of facts established in the record." He continues to explain the evidence that shows, first, "the enormous and rapid German preparations for war; second, the repeatedly avowed intentions of the German leaders to attack and third the fa...