Page:The Art of Cross-Examination.djvu/59

 the preceding chapters it was attempted to offer a few suggestions, gathered from experience, for the proper handling of an honest witness who, through ignorance or partisanship, and more or less unintentionally, had testified to a mistaken state of facts injurious to our side of the litigation. In the present chapter it is proposed to discuss the far more difficult task of exposing, by the arts of cross-examination, the intentional Fraud, the perjured witness. Here it is that the greatest ingenuity of the trial lawyer is called into play; here rules help but little as compared with years of actual experience. What can be conceived more difficult in advocacy than the task of proving a witness, whom you may neither have seen nor heard of before he gives his testimony against you, to be a wilful perjurer, as it were out of his own mouth?

It seldom happens that a witness's entire testimony is false from beginning to end. Perhaps the greater part of it is true, and only the crucial part—the point, however, on which the whole case may turn—is wilfully