A jury at a courtroom trial could feel reluctant to accept the testimony from a witness that has not appeared trustworthy. Consequently, lawyers try to gauge the believability of each client’s witnesses, and to cast doubt on the believability of the other side’s witnesses.
Members of a jury are ready to trust a believable witness.
Jurors have the greatest trust in a neutral source of testimony. That source/witness has no stake in the trial’s outcome.
Features that member of a jury associate with trustworthy witnesses
• Able to recall past events with accuracy
• Present a plausible version of what took place prior to and during a given accident
• Each witness has demonstrated consistency, when asked to retell a specific story.
Ideally, the witness’s eyes saw what took place, or the witness’s ears heard the sounds that were produced by the collision, or the response to the collision.
How could a personal injury lawyer challenge the testimony from a witness for the defendant?
If the testimony has come from an expert, then the Personal Injury Lawyer in Cambridge might inquire about the size of the expert’s fee. Experts that have charged a plaintiff an especially high fee could struggle to win trust from members of the jury.
The plaintiff’s lawyer could ask this: Does the person that has agreed to offer testimony have any connection to the defendant? Good lawyers seek the answer to that question. The existence of such a connection would fail to suggest the maintenance of neutrality. As stated above, juries prefer to hear from a neutral party.
One of the lawyer’s questions could focus on the location of the person that hoped to appear trustworthy. Those on the jury would deserve to know how close that particular witness was to the accident site. In addition, those same 12 people would want to know how clearly the events that took place that day could be seen by the person that has come to the witness stand.
Questions about the reasons for some person’s presence at the accident’s location might also come from a good personal injury lawyer. Such queries could be used to weed out any individual that has been paid to stand in proximity to a faked accident. Obviously, no jurist would trust the veracity of any testimony that has come from someone that lacked a good reason for his or her presence at the accident site.
Neutrality relates to more than the absence of stakes in the case’s outcome. It also maintains an absence of any words of self-aggrandizement. Hence, that should be another consideration of those that have been assigned the job of finding a few trustworthy individuals, among those that claimed to have witnessed some of the injurious events.
