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Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Malilong: Lawyers
By Frank Malilong Jr.
The Other Side
LAST week, I received two identical text messages from Peter Yu and Bob Gothong. Two farmers fought over ownership of a cow, it said. One began to pull from the head, the other from the tail. Meanwhile, a third man began to milk the cow. He was a lawyer.
The lawyer, more than any other professional, gets regularly trounced in jokes coming from all quarters, including, I suspect, the lawyers themselves. We usually do not take offense; in fact, we enjoy a good lawyer joke like everybody else.
I thought I was about to hear another good one in mass last Sunday. The gospel was about a Pharisee who was a lawyer (another version identifies him as a scholar of the law) who tested Jesus by asking him, “which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
“You know how lawyers are,” the padre said at the beginning of his homily. “They ask questions even if they already know the answers.” The lady beside me glanced at me knowingly and I smiled in anticipation of another good joke even if it was at the expense of my profession. None came. The sermon ended as it had begun: the lawyer asks too many questions even if he already knows all the answers.
The observation is only partly correct. We do ask many questions, the answers to which we already know. More often than not, we do that to test the credibility of the witness. The Pharisee’s question was bad only because it was addressed not to any ordinary witness but to God Himself.
Most people are uncomfortable not only with the number of the questions but also with the manner lawyers ask them.
Some attorneys are indeed haughty and overbearing, even obnoxious, especially when cross-examining a witness. But anyone who is telling the truth has nothing to fear.
Moreover, cross-examination is not a modern-day invention. It has in fact a Biblical basis.
The Book of Daniel tells the story of Susanna, “a very beautiful and God-fearing woman” and the wife of a very rich man in Babylon. Two elders, who had been appointed judges, lusted after her but failed to seduce her when she was about to bathe in her husband’s garden. .
Thus spurned, the two DOMs (dirty old men) conspired to accuse her of committing adultery, falsely claiming that she sent her maids out of the garden because she had a tryst with a young man. Because the witnesses against her “were elders and judges of the people” Susanna was convicted and condemned to death.
As she was being led to execution, a young boy named Daniel, demanded that he be allowed to cross-examine the witnesses against Susanna. The elders relented and gave in to his request to question the two judges separately.
Since you said you saw the accused commit the crime she is being accused of, he asked the first judge, please tell us under what tree did you see her and her supposed lover together. “Under the mastic tree,” the witness answered.
Then Daniel called the second witness and asked exactly the same question. “Under an oak,” came the reply. Susanna was exonerated.
(fmmalilong@yahoo.com)
(October 25, 2005 issue)
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