We recommend that all young trial lawyers watch the movie “My Cousin Vinny.” In fact, seasoned trial lawyers can learn much from watching this film. The better the trial lawyer, the better the appreciation for the skill and effectiveness of Vinny Gambino's (Joe Pesci) direct and cross-examinations of various witnesses, including his spunky fiancée, the so-called expert on auto mechanics, Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei), who gets “voir dired” by the prosecutor with a trick question.

The 1992 movie was ahead of its time. There is presently a movement afoot in trial law to move away from Irving Younger's 10 Principles of Cross-Examination that mandates asking only short leading questions and never asking a question to which one does not know the answer. This new method of cross-examination was detailed in a brilliant, recently published book called “The Fearless Cross-Examiner” by Patrick Malone. Malone argues that there are times when it is more persuasive (and less annoying) to use non-leading questions when conducting a cross-examination. He also recommends sometimes asking questions to which one does not know the answer. When speaking across the country about this new method, Malone uses one of Vinny's cross-examinations to demonstrate the effective use of this method.

In cross-examining witnesses, Vinny does not just use short leading questions. For instance, when cross-examining the elderly eyewitness who wore thick-lensed glasses, Vinny does two things brilliantly. First, he makes physical use of the courtroom by having the witness hold the end of a measuring tape and by walking with the tape in hand to a location in the courtroom that the witness indicates is the same distance that she was from the crime scene. Second, as he stands at that location in the courtroom, Vinny does not ask a leading question like “I am holding up two fingers, aren't I,” which would make him sound like a jerk in the presence of this sweet, frail witness. Instead, he asks a nonleading, respectful question, “Mam, how many fingers am I holding up?” Of course, she cannot see to answer.

With another eyewitness, the middle-age gentleman who was making grits, Vinny's examination is again masterful. As with all great witness impeachments, the first thing Vinny does is he gets the witness to commit to his previous testimony about how long he had observed the defendants were in the store (five minutes) which the witness knows because that is how long it took him to make breakfast. Vinny again effectively uses an open-ended question: “How do you know?” He then points out the absurdity of that testimony because the witness was cooking grits, and it takes “the whole grit-eating world 20 minutes to cook grits.”

Vinny then uses sarcasm to get this point across, “Were these magic grits? I mean, did you buy them from the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans?!” He then asks another open-ended question: “Are you sure about that five minutes?” When he doesn't get a straight answer, he does not move on as many trial lawyers would, especially those who use scripted cross-examinations. Instead, he fearlessly presses forward over opposing counsel's objection and the judge's instruction to lay off the witness; he has the witness—by now crestfallen—finally admit “I may have been mistaken.”

Again with the final eyewitness, the middle-aged diminutive man with a thin mustache, Vinny decimates the witness with a number of nonleading questions, asking him to name things that appear in photographs in view from the window where he had observed the crime scene. The witness names a series of impediments to his view of the crime scene. Vinny then combines all of the impediments the witness had named into one final question that casts serious doubt about the witness's testimony that he had seen the defendants at the crime scene—doubt that the witness admits having himself.

There are many other lessons to be learned from the movie, including how to deal with a hostile witness (his fiancée) and how to effectively examine an expert (again his fiancée). The movie has as much potential to educate as it does to entertain.