My favorite court room triumph came in a divorce case where I was cross examining. This was one of my first cross examination cases and I was still pretty naïve in the art. It was a case where I was appearing for the husband in a divorce petition, where he was seeking divorce on the ground of mental cruelty, as his wife had filed a false 498A/ 406 IPC case against him. She had alleged that my client had kept the entire articles of her stridhan and thereby committed criminal breach of trust. The witness in question was the lady’s brother, who had come to depose as to ‘how dutiful his sister was, and it was my client who had treated her cruelly’. As soon as that middle aged North Indian Punjabi Man came into the witness box, I could already see the anger in his gait. He appeared to be a man with an acute sense of honour, and I knew that this potentially might turn out to be his Achilles heel. I planned to hurt his credit and let him burn on his own. I asked him and I remember the exact words :

‘I put it to you that you have sold all your sister’s gold articles, and misappropriated the money!’ He just blew his top off on this one and launched a scathing attack on how insensitive I was. I politely reminded him to answer the question first. He blurted out “That is incorrect!” He further volunteered: “It still remains with us”. I immediately followed it up with the finishing coup de grace and drove the proverbial last nail in the coffin: “but you haven’t brought it to the court! You’re lying!”

He agreed to bring it to the court on the next date of hearing. I got these two answers recorded and concluded the cross examination. Through these two questions, we were able to demonstrate that the 406 IPC charge levelled against my client was false. If we would have asked him whether they had the gold or not directly, he would have clearly denied the same. My client won the case eventually, and this rather damning admission was one of the factors that weighed heavily with the court. A case won by a single question, and a killer argument; nothing compares to this high. One doesn’t need food or drink for days. This made me really happy and yes, the word spread fast, it fetched me a lot of good clients.#Law,#lawyer,#legal,#lawyers,#lawfirm,#lawschool,#lawstudent,#lawyerlife,#justice,#lawyersofinstagram,#advocate,#court,#supremecourt,#highcourt,#lawstudents,#clat,#legalnews,#litigation,#indianlaw,#india,#covid,#judiciary,#advocate

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