ABSTRACT
Above all else, the art of trial cross-examination prescribes a cardinal rule for impeaching the credibility of witnesses and discrediting their testimony, an infrastructural rule phrased in numerous ways but which basically goes like this: Never ask a question to which you do not know the answer (Tanford, 1983; Bailey, 1985; Mauet, 1992; Carlson and Imwinkelried, 1989). More operationally yet just as prescriptively, law texts advise attorneys to "control" testimony through the use of short, leading questions designed to elicit a single discrete fact to which the witness must agree (Haydock and Sonsteng, 1991; Bergman, 1978). As a corollary to the cardinal rule, attorneys employ such questions to "stretch", expand, and emphasize a piece of evidence over the course of several questions or even several minutes rather than exhausting the topic in a single question or two, a "bit-by-bit" or "detailing-to-death" procedure designed not only to control the witness but to give the jury more time to access and appreciate the significance of a particular point of testimony (Tanford, 1983). In so doing, attorneys may construct a piece of evidence cumulatively over time through a series of questions so that the fact in issue assumes a level of unusual and striking importance. Indeed, as Mauet (1992: 221) summarizes this process in his classic trial text, "Cross-examination is in part the art of slowly making mountains out of molehills".
