Lawyer And The Witness
During trial an attorney was enjoying cross-examining his witnesses and forcing them to admit that they were not able to remember all the details of the car accident. The lawyer understood that no witness was perfect with their memory and he had learned through experience how to exploit these minor inconsistencies and lapse in memory to challenge their credibility.
After a series of brutal cross-examinations he was looking forward to his examination of yet another witness.
“Did you actually see the accident?” he asked.
The witness responded with a very polite, “Yes, sir.”
“How far away were you when the accident happened?”
“I was Thirty-four feet, seven and three quarters inches away from the point of collision.”
“Thirty-four feet, seven and three quarter inches?” the lawyer asked, sarcastically, “Do you expect us to believe that your memory is so good, and your sense of distance is so precise, that months after the accident you can come into court and give that type of detail?”
The witness was not phased in the slightest by this question. “Sir, I had a hunch that some obnoxious, know-it-all lawyer would ask me the distance, and would try to make it seem like I was lying if I could not give an exact answer. So I got a tape measure, and measured out the exact distance.”