'In your own words ... ': Questions and answers in a Supreme Court trial

This paper reports on a study of barrister questioning strategies in the course of a six-day Supreme Court murder trial involving sixty different barrister-witness dialogues. In this paper questioning procedures in conjunction with witness answer forms are considered, to gain some measure of the extent to which witnesses are allowed to 'tell their own stories in their own words'. Additional factors taken into account include the presumed sympathies of respective witnesses in order to measure the possibility that questioning strategies differ according to an assumed witness sympathy for the defense or prosecution. The resulting statistics reveal that witnesses provide very little of the crime narrative conveyed to the jury, and that barrister questioning strategies are largely a function of the assumed sympathies of respective witnesses