Page:The Art of Cross-Examination.djvu/124

 art. The lawyer who allows himself to become the mouthpiece of the spite or revenge of his client may inflict untold suffering and unwarranted torture. Such questions may be within the legal rights of counsel in certain instances, but the lawyer who allows himself to be led astray by his zeal or by the solicitations of his client, at his elbow, ready to make any sacrifice to humiliate his adversary, thereby debauches his profession and surrenders his self-respect, for which an occasional verdict, won from an impressionable jury by such methods, is a poor recompense To warrant an investigation into matters irrelevant to the main issues in the case, and calculated to disgrace the witness or prejudice him in the eyes of the jury, they must at least be such as tend to impeach his general moral character and his credibility as a witness. There can be no sanction for questions that tend simply to degrade the witness personally, and which can have no possible bearing upon his veracity. In all that has preceded we have gone upon the presumption that the cross-examiner's art would be used to further his client's cause by all fair and legitimate means, not by misrepresentation, insinuation, or by knowingly putting a witness in a false light before a jury. These methods doubtless succeed at times, but he who practises them acquires the reputation, with astounding rapidity, of being "smart," and finds himself discredited not only with the court, but in some almost unaccountable way,