Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 21.pdf/658

 Hints to Witnesses a sharp retort will not necessarily injure your testimony with the jury. The jury sympathizes with the witness more than with the lawyer, and while mere smartness for the sake of being smart, or because of a too expansive personality, is to be deplored, you will be sure of a sympathetic audience if you are in the right and counsel in the wrong. Do not repeat the question as it is asked you by counsel. If you do not understand the words of the question, ask to have it repeated. Some wit nesses have an annoying habit of re peating every question. This, of course, results in loss of time and is likely to cause irritation on the part of the judge and is fairly open to the criticism that the witness is shuffling or evading in stead of meeting the question fairly and frankly as it is put. Of course, here is the underlying difficulty of human tes timony. A man's manner may inspire confidence, either because of his actually telling the truth or because he is a good actor, and a man's manner may be so unfortunate as to throw a cloud upon his testimony when in fact he is the soul of truth and honor. These, however, are the exceptions. Occasionally a witness comes to the stand who insists upon qualifying every answer by some phrase as "to the best of my knowledge." I once heard a judge say that he was of opinion that a witness that did that habitually and constantly was throwing a sop to his conscience and was unworthy of im plicit belief. While this may have been an extreme criticism, not fairly appli cable even in a majority of cases, still a witness by using this form of ex pression may affect the weight of his testimony. While a witness, believing as he does in the truth of his own tes timony, must, if the fact testified to is the very foundation of the case,

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therefore believe in the rights them selves of that cause, yet he should be careful not to identify himself with that cause if he. is not in fact a party. This is more apt to occur if he is an employee of or directly connected with one of the parties. I remember very effective use being made of the slip of a witness, an employee of the defendant, who referred to the defendant's attor ney as ' ' my lawyer. " If his story was be lieved, there should have been a verdict for the defendant, yet the verdict was for the plaintiff. It was argued to the jury that he had so completely identified him self with the defendant's case, that he was, of necessity, somewhat biased. Hugo Munsterberg in "On the Witness Stand" has given the results of many experiments in connection with the "reaction time" in the same subject, and by a comparison of the length of the pause before an answer is given to a question with the time usually taken by the same person, has attempted to frame a test of the spontaneity of the response as bearing upon the good faith of the answer. This, of course, assumes that every delay is caused by deliberation over not what the true an swer is, but what the witness considers it is most convenient or desirable to reply. In "Truth in the Witness Box" in the Spectator for December 21, 1907, the author gives a reminiscence of a noted murder in which the prisoner went on the stand in his own defense and while suffering under the weight of obviously false denials made pre viously or shortly after his arrest, yet secured belief in his innocence. The prisoner had also attempted to manu facture an alibi, the fact being that he had been with the murdered woman the night of the murder but two or three hours previously to its perpetration. We quote:—