Joel A. Brodsky Opinion: Roland Burris Impeachment Panel Testimony

It's what happens when amateurs pretend to be trial lawyers.

brodskyodeh.com - February 18, 2009

(PRNewsChannel) / Chicago, Ill. / It takes a good 10 years of trial practice to become a good cross-examiner.  You start trying small cases, misdemeanors, smaller commercial cases, order of protection, to get a feel for it. You go to seminars and read books.  And you learn from your mistakes and by watching other lawyers.  Then, after a decade, you have a feeling for how to question a witness.  Then there is the preparation.  In order to be a good cross examiner, you have to be prepared.  You have to know the subject matter almost as well as the person you are questioning.  The rule of thumb I use is an hour of preparation for 30 minutes of questions.

It's no wonder that the questioning of Roland Burris before the Illinois Impeachment Panel was messed up.  The learned representatives were amateurs, hamming it up for a national TV audience.  The questions were so poorly put that no prosecutor would bring a perjury charge based on the record they created.  The Impeachment Committee should have used experienced lawyers to interrogate the witness.  This is what the various committees of U.S. Senate and House of Representatives do when they interrogate witnesses.  First they let the committee lawyer go at the witness, getting the details and exposing the weaknesses in the story.   Only then do the members of Congress and senators get involved, after the groundwork is laid, and after the full story has been detailed.  Often a witness will spend days with the committee lawyers and a few hours with the actual committee.

But here we are in Illinois with yet another mess.  Is Sen. Burris to blame?  Yes and no. If I were his lawyer, and this was a deposition in a lawsuit, we would be laughing at the neophyte lawyer who conducted the questioning, and celebrating a certain victory at any upcoming trial.  But this was not a civil lawsuit and it can be argued he owed the people a duty to be clear.  However, he did win, he got his Senate seat and nobody can get him out.  But the real persons to blame are those who conducted the questioning.  Reading a transcript of the questioning made me cringe.   They could have brought in experts to do the questioning, they could have deferred to experienced trial lawyers, but they didn’t.  They wanted to be on national TV, rather than see that a through job was done.   So if the honorable legislators want someone to blame they only need look into the mirror.

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