Doesn Paired Testing supplant traditional cross-examination?
Yes it does, where it applies. When it does, the interests of justice are advanced. Cross examination sometimes helps the jury toward the truth, sometimes not, depending on the preparation and skill of the attorney and of the witness. It is often necessarily oblique in relation to the dispositive facts, sowing doubt as to them by attacking the witness’s credibility in regard to others. Jurors are invited to suppose that people are either truth-tellers or liars, and judge whole testimony accordingly, when in fact almost all people are both truth-tellers and liars, on various subjects in various contexts at various times. Paired testing goes directly to witnesses’ truthfulness about the facts at hand.
