The Art of Cross-Examination / With the Cross-Examinations of Important Witnesses in Some Celebrated Cases

by Francis L. Wellman

CHAPTER XI

THE CROSS-EXAMINATION OF RICHARD PIGOTT BY SIR CHARLES RUSSELL BEFORE THE PARNELL COMMISSION

The modern method of studying any subject, or acquiring any art, is the inductive method. This is illustrated in our law schools, where to a large extent actual cases are studied, to get at the principles of law instead of acquiring those principles solely through the a priori method of the study of text-books.

As already indicated, this method is also the only way to become a master of the art of cross-examination, and, in addition to actual personal experience, it is important to study the methods of great cross-examiners, or those whose extended experience makes them safe guides to follow.

Hence, the writer believes it would be decidedly helpful to the students of the art of cross-examination to have placed before them, in a convenient and somewhat condensed form, some good illustrations of the methods of well-known cross-examiners as exhibited in actual practice, in the cross-examination of important witnesses in famous trials.

For these reasons, and the further fact that such examples are interesting as a study of human nature, I have in the following pages introduced the cross-examination of some important witnesses in several well-known cases.

Probably one of the most dramatic and successful of the more celebrated cross-examinations in the history of the English courts is Russell's cross-examination of Pigott—the chief witness in the investigation growing out of the attack upon Charles S. Parnell and sixty-five Irish members of Parliament, by name, for belonging to a lawless and even murderous organization, whose aim was the overthrow of English rule.

The principal charge against Parnell, and the only one that interests us in the cross-examination of the witness Pigott, was the writing of a letter by Parnell which the Times claimed to have obtained and published in facsimile, in which he excused the murderer of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and of Mr. Burke, Under Secretary, in Phoenix Park, Dublin, on May 6, 1882. One particular sentence in the letter read, "I cannot refuse to admit that Burke got no more than his deserts."