The Man in Court

by Frederic DeWitt Wells

X[ToC]

THE CONFUSED WITNESS

The whole question as to witnesses is whether they shall be allowed to tell what they want or what the lawyers want. As they are both in the court-room they must abide by the rules of the court. That is the trouble: the rules are against the witness.

When the witness goes on the stand for the first time the court attendant asks her to raise her right hand. She does so and tries to sit down in the witness chair so that she may feel a little more at ease. "Stand up," says the officer. The judge looks at her inquisitorially over his spectacles. She tries to smile and regains her feet. "Raise your hand," says the judge. The delightful and sanitary custom of kissing the Bible has been done away with. Even the habit of resting the hand on the Book is disappearing and in many courts a Bible is hard to find.

The lady, in the confusion of appearing on a stage for the first time and standing on a raised platform before an audience, holds up her left hand. The court attendant jumps at her. The judge has seen the same performance many times before and hardly notices the contretemps. By this time she is confused and ruffled and after hearing something murmured about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, she sinks into the chair and begins in a very uncomfortable frame of mind the ordeal of giving testimony.

What she wants to say, what she ought to say, what she was told to say is all gone. The jury and the judge understand and feel sympathetic but the rules of the court do not permit them to be polite, and to ask her to take a more comfortable chair, to have some tea, whether the children have had any after-effects of the measles, or to take off her hat and stay a while. She knows she has to stay and that she is not going to enjoy it.

She is the important witness who was riding in the car at the time it crashed into the grocery wagon. She is honest, of average intelligence, and wants to tell the truth. She is asked:

"At the time of the accident, where were you?" She says that she was in the car going up-town to see her married daughter whose children were sick with the measles and she was in a hurry. The lawyer moves to strike out the latter part of the answer. The fact that she was going to see her daughter, that the children had the measles, and that she was in a hurry are not relevant and have nothing to do with the case. The only relevant fact is that she was in the up-town car.

She was sitting four seats from the front and thinking the car was going very slowly and the children would be asleep before she got there. It is immaterial that she was thinking about her grandchildren or the measles, or that she was thinking about the car going slowly. The real question is how fast the car was going.

The reason for the rule of evidence is that the court always wants to know not what she thought, but what she actually saw. She will not be allowed to tell what she thought or what she told her daughter after the accident. The daughter can not be called to the stand to testify what her mother told her, when she reached her house, about what had happened. Newspaper accounts of the accident may not be allowed in evidence, nor what the policemen reported on the accident, because he arrived afterward. Anglo-Saxon law holds the proof down to what was actually perceived by the five senses. The court makes up its own mind from these perceptions and the facts themselves. It does not want to hear what someone thinks, or what the witness believes or concludes, but only what he perceived.