Name: English Vocabulary for ESL: Legal Vocabulary - Court Cases
Uploaded: 2020-07-03T02:41:20.000Z
Duration: 5 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Welcome to video of Okay by business English pod dot com Video vocab five more to court cases in Trials This is the second in our three part series on the law.

Adverbs of manner

This episode will look at the vocabulary related to court cases, particularly criminal cases.

Before we get started, let's see what you've remembered from part one.

Think back and see if you can remember the names of three different areas of the law.

Hopefully you managed to remember at least three of these terms civil law, criminal law, contract law, trust law toward law, constitutional law, administrative law and international law.

And how about a definition of law itself?

Law is a system of rules that people are supposed to follow in a particular country or society.

Now let's move on to look at today's topic.

The words used to describe what happens in court and the people involved in a court case.

Once the court cases brought to court, we can say the trial has begun.

A trial is the process of examining a case in a court of law and deciding whether someone has broken the law.

We can have a criminal trial, a murder trial, a fraud, tryem and someone if you are the person accused of a crime.

If something goes wrong in the trial and it has to be stopped, we say there's a mistrial.

And before the actual trial begins, there might be a pretrial hearing to establish the procedures of how the case will be heard.

Okay, so now let's look at the people in the courtroom.

The person in charge of a court case is called the judge.

The judge is responsible for the running of the trial and often making a decision as to whether a crime has been committed.

But in some court cases, the judge does not make this decision.

A jury are members of the public usually 12 in number, who have been chosen to hear a case and then decide if the defendant is guilty or innocent.

The defendant is the person who has been accused of a crime.

If the defendant is found guilty, it means it has been proven that he or she committed the crime, and if they're found innocent, then they have not done anything wrong.

At the beginning of a court case, the charges against the defendant will be read.

The charges are a list of crimes the defendant has been accused off.

The defendant or the defense lawyer will then enter a plea.

A plea is a statement of whether they believe their innocent or guilty of the charges.

Once the case begins, both the defense and prosecution will present evidence and ask witnesses to answer questions related to the crime.

Evidence is a set of facts that relate to a crime, and witnesses are people who might have seen the crime take place or have some other knowledge of it.

A witness will testify to what they know about the case.

This is a formal statement given under oath of what they saw or know about the case, often called their testimony.

If testimony is given under oath, it means the witness has officially promised to tell the truth.

Once the judge and jury have heard all the witnesses testimonies and the defense and prosecution have summarized their cases, the jury will then retire to deliberate on the case and reach a decision to retire in this case means to leave the courtroom and go to a special jury room that nobody else is allowed to enter to deliberate means to consider and discuss the case with other members of the jury.

When they are ready to publicly announce their decision, they returned to the courtroom and state their verdict.

If the verdict is guilty, the judge will then convict the defendant of the crime and deliver the sentence.

The sentence is the punishment defendant must do to pay for the crime.

This is typically a fine or prison sentence.

 They have to pay the court, and a prison sentence is the length of time the defendant will have to spend in jail. 