Joe Friday the fictional detective of Dragnet, the TV show, had his character ultimately summed up into this one sentence: "Just the facts, ma'am." The thing is, we like to believe that those that are jurors while they are listening to testimony that they are concentrating on just the facts of the case, and none of the histrionics or misdirection, and we also like to believe that witnesses to a crime, will just recite to law enforcement the pertinent facts of the situation, but none of this is true to life. In point of fact, the way that we often process information and divulge information is through stories, if we didn't do that, than there would be little or no interest in us watching plays, dramas, soap operas, or reading fictional books, because all of these are stories and they interest us because stories engage our attention, far more than dry facts do, because stories allow us to construct pictures in our mind which helps us relate to it as well as to re-construct and de-construct the story to fit our mindset.
In our criminal prosecutorial justice system, we are entitled by the 6th Amendment to an impartial jury of our peers, so that, even though, the judge, the prosecutor, and the defense attorney, are all lawyers, the jury box typically contains no lawyers, whatsoever. This means, that the special games and lawyer-speak that lawyers typically construct so as to justify their high fees and station in life, somewhat goes over the head of jurors, because the respective jurors are neither part of the field of law, nor typically do they really care to be. This means, that a good lawyer, must therefore know his audience, so that the display of the most eloquent elocutions and the most incisive dry wit, demonstrating that the lawyer is a maestro of his field, probably impresses only and is effective specifically for those that are fellow lawyers and of minimal relevance to the jurors themselves.
The jurors on a given case do care about the evidence, but because most jurors have never been a juror before, have had minimal or no training in the intricacies of the law, and are for the most part at a loss as to how to frame, record, and to construct good and pertinent notes during the trial, they must as an alternative, construct stores in their mind in regards to the testimony that they are hearing. These stories that jurors construct are based on what the prosecutor and the defense council have presented to them during the course of the trial, to which it is from these stories presented, as well as the stories constructed in each juror's mind that the story of what appeared to have happened is ultimately decided for each juror.
All this would imply that the opening statements that are made by each respective attorney are of crucial importance, perhaps the most importance of anything presented to the jurors during the course of the trial, because it is these statements that fundamentally create at the inception two opposing story lines inside the juror's head to which at the conclusion of the testimony, but often well before, the juror will have reconciled these two stories in such a manner as to construct a story believable unto himself, and having come to their own conclusive story, jurors will often dismiss all evidence, no matter how compelling, that would tarnish the story that they have so constructed.
When lawyers complain, and often rightly so, that the jury did not render the correct decision based on all of the evidence, the fault lies most often in the inability of one of the lawyers to construct a meaningful story that not only makes sense but also resonates with the respective jury.