My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. (James 1:19-20)
In trial, the best witness is not the smartest, wittiest or most prepared. It is the man who is not enraged by confrontation with an uncomfortable truth. A witness (even without coaching) will generally adopt his most reasonable demeanor—the same mask that he might wear for a job interview—in hopes that the jury will “hire” him for his version of the truth. During the direct examination, his lawyer helps him with this by asking him questions designed to support the mask. If done well, by the end of his testimony, the jury is thinking, “well, this is a reasonable fellow who did what he could under tough circumstances. That could be me.”
And then there is the cross-examination. When I was first learning to try cases (by badly trying cases), I would painstakingly prepare complicated cross-examination outlines. Full of logic and irrefutable reason, they were designed to prove the witness wrong, and they were useless. What sounded good when I practiced it in the mirror before the trial never went anywhere during the trial because the witness would just politely disagree with my logic, feign confusion with my reason and leave me angry and looking like someone who had already convinced himself he was the smartest guy in the room. And most importantly, after all my hot air, the jury would be looking at the witness and thinking, “well this is still a reasonable fellow, even with all that lawyer’s badgering. That still could be me.“
After a lot of bad cross-examinations, I ultimately realized the trick was not to prove the witness wrong, but to prove him unreasonable. All I had to do was unmask the witness a bit so that the jury would “fire” him and accept my witnesses’ version of the truth. I also realized that I did not have four hours to do that because the jury’s attention span was at most 20 minutes long. I learned that the quickest way to unmask a witness was to make him angry, and the quickest way to make him angry was to confront him with an uncomfortable truth about himself. You would think it otherwise, that it would be an unfair or untrue accusation that would do the trick. Nope. The witness will just deny it. He might even laugh. But an uncomfortable truth pricks the pride. The anger wells, and the man fights you over what is plain for all to see. From Rage Comes Veritas, and the mask falls off. The jury starts thinking, “well, this man is not so reasonable after all.” They stop thinking “that could be me.” But I don’t stop thinking the angry witness could be me. He is me.
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