![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Tacopina also forgot the cardinal rule to never ask a question where you don’t know the answer.Īnyone who watches an episode of Law & Order (more on that shortly) knows that an attorney should never ask a question on cross-examination where they do not already know the answer (and have the evidence to control the witness). Once she admitted that she found it amazing that she went from bantering with Trump to being a rape victim in the course of a couple of minutes, he had no place left to go. Rather, he repeatedly just tried to get Carroll to admit that her testimony was “incredible” or “extraordinary”. When he then tried to debunk it, he rarely had anything of substance to convince the jury that she must have been lying. He spent minutes at a time giving Carroll the opportunity to repeat her direct testimony. Good cross-examination will then lay out, in simple and direct assertions (phrased as questions), why the prior testimony had to be false. The best cross-examination usually avoids this problem by using this formulation: “When you said on direct examination, that was not the truth, was it?” The witness will either defend the prior testimony or appear confused. This is difficult, because it is a challenge to remind the jurors of the testimony that the attorney intends to discredit without recapitulating that testimony. One of the central rules of cross-examination is to never reinforce the testimony that the witness provided during direct testimony. Jane Rosenberg/Reuters Tacopina Violated Cardinal Rules Of Cross-Examination ![]()
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