Hostile Witness

DateLine (1/25/06 – Buies Creek, North Carolina)
Guest Contributor for Reference Point - Tripp Atkins

I like to tell my friends how hard law school is, so I am a little ashamed of what we did in class last week. We watched a movie! And not one of those boring movies like we have watched before showing us the proper technique for introducing some evidence into a trial but a “real” Hollywood movie. We watched the 1992 classic “My Cousin Vinny”.

Now, just in case you aren’t familiar with the movie, it stars Joe Pesci as an attorney and Ralph Macchio (that’s right, the Karate Kid) as a college student from New York City wrongly accused of murder in a small town in Alabama. Joe’s character has been out of law school for six years but hasn’t tried a case yet. He lead’s Ralph to believe that it’s because he is a personal injury attorney and has been able to settle his cases. Turns out that it took him six tries to pass the bar exam. Joe doesn’t know anything about trying a case, criminal procedure, trial advocacy, or discovery rights – much less about how to win a murder trial that would most definitely end in the death penalty in that small Alabama town.

During the trial, the key witness called by the defense was going to rebut the testimony of one of the prosecution’s witnesses. This witness just happened to be Joe Pesci’s fiancée and the couple had just been in a huge fight about when they were getting married. Joe had told her they would get married as soon as he won his first case. I think Joe was a little afraid of commitment and knew that it was more probable than not he wouldn’t win a case (in law school we call that the “preponderance of the evidence” standard). Since the fiancée was a little mad at Joe, she refused to answer any question that Joe asked. She was belligerent and rude. In legal terminology a witness that is called to testify on behalf of a party but becomes openly antagonistic is called a “hostile witness.” Once a judge declares a witness to be hostile it allows the attorney to take more control in the questioning of the witness.

Are you a hostile witness? God calls us to be His “witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1: 8). Sometimes in our daily lives it gets hard to be the perfect witness. Someone cuts you off in traffic. You don’t get the right change when you pay for dinner. When things get tough it seems like the devil is just asking the wrong questions causing us to go down the wrong roads, say things we don’t mean, and do things we shouldn’t. When times get like this, The Supreme Judge might have to declare us “hostile” so our public defender, Jesus Christ, can take measures into His own hands. Thank God!