I was delighted to deliver three training sessions to the Tanganyika Law Society this August, working with Lawyers Without Borders (LWOB) to bring almost 100 lawyers together to rethink one of the most powerful, and perhaps most misunderstood, tools in a courtroom: cross-examination.
Across the three sessions we moved from theory to practice, and from principle to proposition, covering how cross-examination should be conducted when a witness, complainant or defendant is a child or is otherwise vulnerable, and how cross-examination can be used, ethically and effectively, as the central engine of advocacy in prosecuting or defending a case.
This training was developed with my assistant Dr Monique Mann. Monique is a criminologist whose work focuses on criminal law, surveillance, social justice and human rights. She is a Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University and is currently completing a Juris Doctor at RMIT University.
Why This Training Mattered
Tanzania has already built an important legislative and procedural foundation for supporting vulnerable court users that allow children and vulnerable persons to give evidence where they can understand the questions put to them. The courts can also make protective orders, from evidence by video link to non-disclosure of identifying information.
But legislation alone does not protect a witness. The advocate’s role is to complement these protections by asking questions that maximise understanding, participation and the reliability of evidence. That was the heart of the first session: research consistently shows that some lawyers still ask questions that vulnerable witnesses simply cannot understand, multiple propositions bundled together, complex grammar, double negatives, legal jargon and compound questions. Poor questioning does not expose inconsistency; it creates it. Good advocacy, by contrast, promotes both fairness and accuracy, because fairness requires effective participation, understanding proceedings, understanding questions, communicating answers and giving instructions, and that principle applies equally to witnesses, complainants and defendants alike.
I walked participants through the internationally recognised reforms driving this shift, including trauma-informed advocacy, Ground Rules Hearings, the use of intermediaries, judicial case management, and evidence-based questioning drawn from resources such as The Advocate’s Gateway toolkits which I spent many years contributing to. The central proposition I asked every advocate to test themselves against is simple: can this person understand me? Can they answer accurately? And am I testing the evidence, or just testing their command of language? Good questions, we agreed, are short, concrete, chronological, confined to one proposition at a time, and expressed in plain language suitable to the person being questioned, principles that apply whether the witness is a child, a person with a learning disability, someone who is neurodivergent, or someone living with the effects of trauma or brain injury.
Cross-Examination as the Engine of Advocacy
The second and third sessions turned to a broader proposition: that cross-examination remains, as John Henry Wigmore described it in 1923, “the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth” but with the qualifier that modern understanding of trauma and vulnerability has fundamentally changed our understanding of how that engine should be used. I set out the shift from traditional to modern approaches: from solely seeking to discredit the person giving evidence to testing the reliability of evidence; from solely attacking credibility to building strategic concessions; from a mantra of ‘winning the exchange’ to assisting the person to achieve their best evidence and assisting the court to determine the facts; from adversarial confrontation to disciplined, strategic persuasion and, sometimes, agreement.
I offered lawyers a practical three-part framework for every cross-examination:
- Purpose: Why am I asking this witness questions at all, and what admissions, disputed issues or facts am I pursuing?
- Structure: How will I organise my propositions into logical, sequenced chapters, building concessions incrementally through short, leading, one-fact-at-a-time questions rather than broad, compound challenges?
- Judgment: should I even ask this question, and when should I stop? Good advocates, I emphasised, are distinguished less by technique than by judgment: knowing whether to cross-examine, what to ask, and when silence is the stronger strategy.
We also worked through how to respond to witnesses who appear “difficult.” Traditional advocacy categorises witnesses by behaviour such as being evasive, inconsistent, slow to answer. Modern, trauma-informed advocacy asks a different question: why is this witness behaving this way? Evasiveness may reflect confusion rather than dishonesty; inconsistency may reflect fragmented memory rather than deceit; slowness to answer may reflect a processing difficulty rather than evasion. Some difficult witnesses are vulnerable, some vulnerable witnesses appear difficult, and it is the advocate’s judgment that determines the appropriate response.
Building Capacity for Fair Trials
Delivering this training to close to 100 lawyers in Tanzania was a genuine privilege, and a reminder of why capacity-building work of this kind matters so much for justice systems everywhere. Effective, trauma-informed, rights-respecting advocacy protects everyone in the courtroom, complainants and accused persons alike, and strengthens public confidence in criminal justice. My thanks go to Lawyers Without Borders and the Tanganyika Law Society for the opportunity to share this work, and to every lawyer who gave their time to engage with it. The quality of cross-examination, ultimately, is determined by the quality of the questions we choose to ask and by the judgment we bring to deciding whether to ask them at all.
Dr Monique Mann is a Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University and is currently completing a Juris Doctor at RMIT University.
