In a jury trial, the Chewbacca defense is a legal strategy in which a criminal defense lawyer tries to confuse the jury rather than refute the case of the prosecutor. It is an intentional distraction or obfuscation.
Johnnie Cochran uses the Chewbacca defense against Chef in the South Park episode "Chef Aid".
A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. A red herring may be used intentionally, as in mystery fiction or as part of rhetorical strategies, or may be used in argumentation inadvertently.
In the mystery novel A Study in Scarlet, the detective Sherlock Holmes examines a clue which is later revealed to be intentionally misleading.
Herrings "kippered" by smoking, salting and artificially dyeing until made reddish-brown, i.e., a "red herring". Prior to refrigeration, kipper was known for being strongly pungent. In 1807, William Cobbett wrote how he as a child together with other children used a kipper to lead hunting dogs away from the scent of a hare the children intended to hunt—an apocryphal story that was probably the origin of the idiom.
