On the old Perry Mason TV show, Perry would always come to the point in his questioning where he’d dress down the (normally innocent) defendant pretty thoroughly. Somehow, Mason’s line of questioning and stern dimeanor always managed to get someone from the gallery – out of nowhere – to suddenly rise up and confess to the crime.
Now, conventional wisdom is that court cases just don’t go down like that. Drama was added to make for better television.
Yet I wonder – due simply to the Law of Weird Stuff Happening … have there ever been criminal trials (famous, even legendary, cases among trial lawyers) in which someone from the gallery did, in fact, come out of nowhere and confess to the crime, thereby getting the innocent defendant off the hook?
Lawyer for 13 years, magistrate for 4. I’ve seen some scummy witnesses implode under skillful cross-examination, but I’ve never heard of anything like this happening. Pure Hollywood, IMHO.
Slightly off topic for GQ but I’ll take a chance. Didn’t PM usually get the witness to confess rather than someone from the gallery? Or was that Matlock. Or both. Either way I’m interested to hear if it ever happened in real life.
Yeah … a lot of times, he did just break down a witness. But:
Didn’t he often call someone from the gallery to serve as a witness? He’d be cross-examining someone, then someone from the gallery would gasp or cry out “No!”. Then Mason would summarily call them to the stand, and extract a confession.
Yes, this fits better with my recollections, from all the Perry Mason incarnations. Sometimes it was someone from the gallery… (often the lover/spouse/parent/child of the witness Perry was crossing,) but he was never questioning the defendant when it happened. He was the defense attorney after all… and treating his own client as a hostile would have been very improper. Can’t think of any indications when he did that.
And as an aside: I think I always got the impression that ‘court cases just don’t go down like that’ was something that was admitted in the PM universe, but the fact that Perry often solved the case with his showboating was something that was difficult to argue with. The judges hemmed and hawed about it, but generally they let him get away with his ‘courtroom circus’ antics – as long as he always got results.
Nothing to contribute to the OP’s question.
Don’t good trial lawyers want ot AVOID surprises? The 1st rule of cross-examination is: do NOT ask a question that you don’t know the answer to. As for badgering people on the stand, don’t most judges look askance at it? of course, Perry Mason was quite entertaining. I found actual trials to be extremely boring affairs. with frequent interruption. And, suppose PM is cross-eamining a witness-and the witness all of a sudden blurts out “HE did it, the postman killed her”-isn’t that something you would want ot avoid? Emotional outbursts are not reliable indicators of truthfulness.
Note that Perry Mason was very rarely set in an actual trial. It was almost always during the preliminary hearing, where the rules are somewhat different and, IIRC, more informal.
I understand that these kinds of events would be vanishingly rare, but I figured there’s be some good stories floating around when lawyers got around to shop talk and bull sessions. Something like, “That actually happened to this poor bastard back in 1963. It goes something like this …” Almost on the order of professional urban legends, but perhaps with a grain of truth.
I mean, think about it. Priceless stories like “That would be in the butt, Bob” almost never happen on real-life game shows – except that one time it really did. Stories like that Rudy kid walking on to the Notre Dame football team … that never really happens, either – except that one time it did.
Figured that there’d be a few analogous stories stemming from the trial lawyer profession. As much as lawyers try to avoid surprises … sure some trial lawyer, somewhere, sometime got caught off guard. And surely, at least afew of those surprises were spectacular, and heavfily infuenced the course of a trial.
F. Lee Bailey was a friend and colleague of Erle Stanley Gardner (they worked together on the famous Dr. Sam Sheppard case- the one that inspired “The Fugitive”), and in an article Bailey wrote years ago, he said he’d once asked Gardner if he’d ever actually seen a witness break down on the stand an confess to a crime, as they did all the time in “Perry Mason” mysteries. Gardner laughed and said, “Of course not. Have you?”
Bailey said he HAD seen it happen once. Only once. And Bailey wasn’t the lawyer who made it happen- he was merely a spectator at a trial where another attorney had torn apart a witness during cross-examination, and gotten a tearful confession.
It’s much more fascinating to me that are so few (if any) real-life Perry Mason trials than if there were many hundreds of them. It strikes me the same way it would if I were to learn (hypothetically) that no anchorperson ever flubbed a line, or no surgeon every made a mistake on a patient.
The difference is, the anchorperson has every incentive to correctly speak the words scrolling past on the TelePrompter, and the surgeon has every incentive to capably and skillfully operate on a patient. Certainly mistakes happen, but not because the anchorperson or the surgeon want them to.
However, the witness under cross-examination (or the guy who jumps up in the back of the courtroom) who says, “You got me, Perry, I did it! I killed the guy!” has many good reasons not to say that.
JEEZUSS! OK, I did it! I broke down in the gallery when my mom was on the stand being crossed by a skillful New York attorney! I did it, I swear! And I’m so ashamed! I promised I’d never speak of it here but…but…oh! Your false naivte’ is just laughing me into explosions of grief! sob
Not exactly what the OP is looking for, but it’s somewhat in the ballpark. About 15+ years ago the city of Nashville had a DUI case implode on them so severely that it threw into question all their previous DUI arrests for several years. The city had their expert witness on the stand describing how the breathalyzers worked when the defense attorney asked if the police radios could interfere with the breathalyzer and give a false positive to which the expert witness replied that it was indeed possible.
There was also a statutory rape case in Murfreesboro back in the early 90s got tossed out because of something the victim said in the judge’s chambers. Exactly what she said isn’t known, but during the hearing the victim said something which caused the DA, judge, and defense attorney to adjurn with the victim to the judge’s chambers. When they came out, the judge, DA, and defense attorney all apologized to the jury for taking up their time and dismissed the case.
Brand-spanking new PD, representing a homeless client charged with aggravated assault after beating another homeless person with a piece of lumber. A quick bargain is reached - plead to simple assault and get time served. But the defendant has to allocute – that is, stand in front of the judge and admit what he did.
Although the deal has been explained and he said he understood, now the client won’t admit to doing anything wrong; he keeps saying, “He hit me first!”
His PD is standing next to him, sweating because this isn’t going smoothly, and keeps whispering to him, “You have to admit the acts! You have to admit the acts!”
Finally drivien beyond frustration, client turns to PD and yells, “It wasn’t no axe! It was a 2 by 4!”
The breathalyzers used by Cleveland police and the Ohio Highway Patrol have shielding and use a calibration process that includes a check for radio interference. Theoretically, at least, this isn’t a problem here.
A couple of years ago I was a party in a small-claims court in Torrance, CA. Before the proceedings began, the judge spoke to the people present, explaining a critical difference between a real court case and such programs as Judge Judy or Perry Mason: the judge does not render his decision on the spot, nor does either party have the right to produce “surprise” evidence (by dint of the rules of discovery).
Maybe that’s the point: The TV program must conform to an hour or half-hour format, including its time constraints. (And, having been a juror in a real criminal trial, I know the way the courts proceed in such circumstances. The Perry Mason show often used a preliminary trial–this freed the producers from having to cast a jury.)
