Why did this US prosecutor keep asking whether documents would refresh a witness&#39;s memory? Background I served on a jury during a criminal trial in the United States several years ago. There was a strangely formal interaction that repeated itself a few times during the trial. The prosecutor, while holding some document, would ask a question which required the witness to recall some specific detail. The witness would reply &quot;I don't remember.&quot; The prosecutor would then ask &quot;Would looking at [some document] refresh your memory?&quot;, to which the witness would answer &quot;Yes.&quot; The prosecutor would then hand the document to the witness, who would look at it and then answer the question. It's obvious that the prosecutor already knew the question wouldn't be answerable without reference to the report or document - that's why they were holding it. But then why perform the dance of &quot;do you recall&quot; / &quot;no&quot; / &quot;would this refresh your memory&quot; / &quot;yes&quot;? The Question It's clear the witness needs the document to answer the prosecutor's question, so what's the value in the prosecutor asking the witness the question the first time without the document? Disclaimer (it may be that this was simply this prosecutor's way of phrasing questions, rather than a feature of the United States criminal judicial system. If that's the case this question won't be answerable, since it calls for knowing the mindset of a specific individual. If so, let me know and I'll delete it) Further information In the real-life situation I found myself in, the witness was for the prosecution. However, I'm equally interested in answers (such as hszmv's) that explain why the adversarial lawyer might also use this technique, if relevant.
united-states Witnesses are generally confined to giving testimony from their own personal memory; most of the time, they can't read a statement into the record or just tell the jury to go look at some other piece of evidence. But this creates problems when a witness knows an important fact but doesn't remember it when she takes the stand. Maybe she counted exactly how much money she stuffed in the robber's bag as she was doing it, and she wrote it down as soon as he fled, but a year later, she can't remember that it was $93,736.45. But the prosecutor isn't allowed to just give the witness a stack of evidence and let her go hunting through the documents to answer each question. Instead,he goes through the &quot;Do you remember&quot; colloquy to lay the necessary foundation to refresh the witness's memory, as contemplated by Rule 612, which then also triggers certain rights for the opposing party with respect to the document used to refresh the witness's memory.
Would a U.S court honor his request, based on his prior commitment? You are not specifying the purpose of the court hearing, or whether Adam is pro se litigant (which sounds unlikely if this plaintiff is a movie star). If plaintiff Adam is represented by an attorney, Adam's presence is unnecessary in most or all court hearings. In fact, typically neither parties nor their lawyers have to show up in court, whence their absence does not constitute contempt of court. Absence merely implies that they miss the opportunity to [orally] argue their position before the court, and thus would depend on whether the judge bothers to actually read their brief. If you mean a hearing in which Adam needs to be present, his request to reschedule the hearing is most likely to be granted. His contract is strong evidence that his request is not a vexatious attempt to delay proceedings. Since the hearing would be in month 4, the particularity that his contract goes up to month 4 implies that rescheduling would not significantly delay proceedings. Regarding your comment, rescheduling can (and does) happen multiple times even in criminal cases. This post includes an excerpt of the Register of Actions of criminal case 16-870-FH in Michigan state court (Washtenaw county), highlighting several instances of rescheduling as requested by the defense counsel and despite prosecutor's objection. I believe the case got rescheduled a few more times beyond what the snapshots reflect.
united-states Perjury only applies to someone who actually does testify and is untruthful. A person who refuses to testify at all, when ordered to do so by a subpoena, is committing contempt of court. It is possible, in principle, for the court to order them jailed indefinitely until they do testify (civil contempt). It is also possible for them to be prosecuted criminally afterward (criminal contempt).
To what degree are such emails admissible in court as evidence, and what weight do they carry? Your own statement, when offered by you as evidence, is hearsay, unless it comes within an exception to that rule. Recorded recollection might be one of the better exceptions. There is also a chance that you could get it in as a business record of the company if you were using a company email account and the company stores all of its email communications. The documents also sometimes come in to provide fair context for a conversation with a party-opponent's statements that are admissible. It appears that Canada does not follow the modern British rule (which repealed the hearsay rule in civil cases in 1995), which if it were available, would come in without any difficulty at all. But, Canada does have what it calls a "principled exception" (which is somewhat broader than the parallel U.S. residual hearsay exception) that is generally available if the document can be shown to be reliable and there is an unavailable witness, or if there proponent of the document can show that it is reliable and necessary for other reasons. Even if the document itself is not admissible since it is hearsay, you could still testify as to what the boss said from your own recollection, and then have your lawyer ask you why you are sure that this is what was said. You would answer that you contemporaneously wrote a confirming letter to the boss spelling out what was said and you reviewed it to refresh your recollection before testifying at the hearing or trial. These kinds of confirming letters are used quite frequently in business and employment litigation. And, in my experience, these statements tend to be surprisingly effective and persuasive, because, while they do not foreclose the possibility that the person writing it was lying or inaccurate in the confirming email account, it does rule out the possibility that you forgot exactly what was said, and you provided the boss with an opportunity to dispute you which the boss didn't feel an obligation to correct. If one party has a coherent account in confirming emails of what was said, and the other party is trying to remember what happened a year or two earlier without notes from the witness stand, the person with the coherent, documented account is almost always going to come across as more credible unless the other side can show that your confirming emails are not infrequently gross misrepresentations of what really occurred. (I've also dealt with witnesses like that now and then.)
It seems generally uncontroversial that in examining a witness at trial, a lawyer may not ask questions implying that the witness has engaged in some wrongdoing, unless the lawyer has some basis for asking those questions. This is not true. A lawyer is allowed to guess and ask such a question, although if it assumes a fact not in evidence it could be objected to for lack of foundation. For example, the opposing counsel could object if the lawyer asked, "After you drank twelve beers at BigTown Sports Bar, isn't it true that you got into a car and drove away?", because there would be no evidence in the record at that point that he drank twelve beers at BigTown Sports Bar. For instance, in the absence of any evidence indicating that alcohol was involved, I would imagine that a plaintiff's lawyer in an accident case could not cross-examine a defendant with leading questions suggesting that he had been drunk at the time of the crash. Sure he could. He could ask, "Isn't it true that you were drunk at the time of the crash?" There is nothing objectionable about that question. If the answer was "no", however, and the lawyer had nothing else to back up that suggestion, the question might not help the case, but the question is proper. Sometimes a lawyer just has a hunch and goes with it, and sometimes the hunch is right. Is this rule codified in a rule of evidence or is it just rooted in the courts' ideas of decorum and propriety? I can see how it might implicate the Rules of Professional Conduct, but that wouldn't seem to provide a remedy to a party who was prejudiced by such behavior. I'm more interested here with civil cases than criminal, where a defendant's Sixth Amendment rights might be complicate the question. It isn't codified because such a rule does not exist. There are some special rules that apply to prosecutors, who are ethically required to bring criminal cases only when they believe that the cases are supported by probable cause. But, that rule applies at the case level and not at the question by question level. Lawyers are also prohibited, especially in criminal cases, from making statements asserting personal knowledge of the credibility of a defendant or witness. This is because this transforms the lawyer from an advocate to a credibility witness. But, the lawyer can ask a judge or jury to find that someone is not credible in closing argument based upon X, Y and Z evidence presented at trial.
It doesn't really matter exactly what the judge says as long as it's clear whether the judge is sustaining or overruling the objection. With that said, in movies you'll rarely see the person asking the question get to respond to the objection, but you'll notice in the trial that happens in most cases. For example, if one party objects that a question calls for hearsay, the examiner may defend their question by pointing out that the statement is not offered for the truth of the matter asserted, or that it falls into one of the hearsay exceptions. At that point the judge is responding to both parties and someone else or possibly multiple people have spoken since the objection was originally raised, so she might specify that she's &quot;overruling the objection&quot; as opposed to just saying overruled, so it just makes it clearer on the record what she's ruling about. It's worth noting as well that she might need to specify which objection she's sustaining if more than one objection is raised. In this trial both hearsay and relevance objections have been raised at the same time, and the judge might specify that she's sustaining e.g. only relevance. This can tell the examiner whether they are free to keep going down the same line of questioning with different questions, if the objection sustained was hearsay, or to move to another line of questioning, if the objection sustained was relevance.
Your question slightly misrepresents what the article says: Yes, the judge denied the motion which led to the collapse of the case, he did not make a ruling on the substance of the case. The distinction is significant to my mind as the judge was using non-evidentiary knowledge (i.e. what he read in the paper) to make a decision on process; in this case a process that would have put a lot of people to a lot of inconvenience. It would not be proper for the judge to have used such knowledge to inform a judgement. It is also not clear from the article if the academic paper in question was actually introduced by the defendant as evidence. If that was the case then it is only right and proper for the judge to consider it. As to why a judge is allowed to read the news and a jury is not, I can offer several ideas: A judge must document their reasoning process in a judgement which is subject to review - if they were to make a decision based on matters not supported by the evidence then an appeals court could correct it. Alternatively, juries are specifically prohibited from revealing their reasoning process to anyone. Judges do their jobs for years, perhaps a whole career - to prohibit them from consuming media is a) unworkable and b) a serious impediment on their lifestyle. Juries are empaneled for weeks or months - such sacrifices are more reasonable. Judges are (supposedly) trained and impartial professionals who are more readily able to make the distinction between evidence and news. Newsworthy cases are relatively rare
Misstating the truth is not perjury Perjury is deliberately lying under oath to gain a material advantage. For the situation you describe: You might be wrong and they actually do live where they say they do they might be wring and they genuinely think they live where they say they do, being wrong is not perjury it’s unlikely to administrate info in the form actually carries the penalty of perjury, it probably isn’t testimony unless it will positively and substantially affect the outcome of the case in their favour, it isn’t material You lack standing to interfere in the case in any event If this were brought to the attention of the court the most likely outcome would that it would just be corrected.