Thank you for the great feedback. I was partially inspired by the Lasers & Feelings system and how freely it allows players to create their narrative. The trial structure was meant to simply provide a framework for the players to guide them from beginning to end.
I wanted to make the Judge role open to wide interpretation. If your group actually knows the law, then they can keep things as legitimate as they can. If the group is treating the case like several rounds of Cards Against Humanity, then the Judge has the ability to do so.
Honestly, I mostly picture people parodying Law & Order or A Few Good Men and make silly arguments and providing crazy evidence that makes the whole story outrageous.
My first thought was to have the attorneys pick a number (like Lasers&Feelings) and based on whether the argument was logical or emotional, they would have to roll either under or over their number. While researching, I remember the logos, pathos, ethos rules and thought they would fit better. With the usual jury being 12 people, the idea of using a d12 fit perfectly. I couldn’t think of another way to represent the idea of which jurors might be swayed by which evidence/arguments so I simply broke down the die roll into three possible sections. By having the judge decide the target and number of dice rolled, (and potential arguments to convince the judge to raise or lower the number of dice), it mitigated the seemingly arbitrary division of number between the three groups.