I was a prosecutor in D.C. for 35 years. Now I'm exclusively a writer. Here's my take on the first stage of trial.
A prosecutor's opening statement in a criminal trial is a short story, fraught with the potential for dire real life consequences.
It has to start with a hook, a first sentence that sets out its theme. That first sentence needs to be the thread that will be woven through the rest of the trial, to be knotted up at the end. And that sentence has to be succinct and pithy: no word can be more than two syllables. Going further, as to the whole of opening statement: unless technical terms have to intrude, stick to the same rule. If you're using a word that's more than two, at most three, syllables, it had better be mellifluous. If you doubt me on the syllable rule, think about the main lines in the speeches that most moved you, and say them out loud to yourself.
Opening statement needs to set a place, just as a short story does. The place comes first, always. All criminal cases by definition arise out of one of two places: an inside scene or an outside scene. If it's an inside scene, the jury has to have a connection with it in order to care about, or at least be interested in, the people who populated it. They have to think, that could be my house, or my office, my workplace. If it's an outside scene, the same. They have to think, that could be my neighborhood.
After opening statement has set out place, it needs to populate the place with characters: the people who will be called as witnesses in the prosecution case. Those characters have to be portrayed authentically, with warts and all. A prosecutor can never hide the negative side of any witness who's to be called in the course of the case, just as the author must always observe the true nature of the people that they've allowed to run about their keyboard, and then let loose upon the world.
Finally, a prosecutor's opening statement has to end with an utterance it is definitive and unequivocal — "beyond a reasonable doubt guilty!" — even as it's being delivered with the author's secret knowledge that the vagaries of life can steer any story wildly off track.