Which story is better?
In most cases during trials the confrontation is with the witnesses, not with your opponent.
As a district attorney I was babysitting a death penalty murder case for a while. A high-powered guy–that’s a dangerous criminal brought in as a witness–came in to say some BS testimony. He’s in handcuffs.
When he got off the witness stand he goes, hauls off and slugs the baliff, cold-cocks him, knocks him about ten feet in the air, knocks his tooth out. This high-powered guy has no control.
The defendant is sitting at the other end of counsel table while this is all going on, saying to me, “I’m going to kill you.” That I took seriously. It was very cold, and left me fearful, in a state of disbelief. This guy is a cold-blooded killer.
The irony is he’s free and living with the attorneys in their house. They’re writing books together.
After the second question he said, “you ask a lot of questions.” I said, “Yeah I do. Does that bother you?”
He goes, “as a matter of fact it does. I don’t think I want to answer anymore of your questions.”
“Well then, you can hit the door.” My niece is sitting there shyly.
“You want to take her out, to leave the house with her, you’ll answer my questions.” They were like, where do you work? Where do you live? I’m not shy. I don’t care. You don’t like it, it’s just too bad. I finally told him, “you can leave.”
He said, “Mary, let’s go.”
She says, “I’m not going.”
Then he says,”Then I’ll stay.”
We started talking. The coffee table was glass, perfect, nothing on it, just been cleaned. So I was finally going to let them leave together. He was a real smart aleck.
So he puts his hands on the glass. Thump! And says, “Here. In case I don’t come back, you got a good set of prints.”
When he left, my other niece said, “Let me clean the table.” You could see all his ten fingers. I yelled, “Don’t touch the table, until she walks in the door!” I wouldn’t have done that years before.