Legal Usage
In a legal trial, a compound question will likely raise an objection, as the witness may be unable to provide a clear answer to the inquiry. For example, consider an imagined dialogue between a cross-examining attorney and a witness:
- A: "So instead of murdering your neighbor, did you go home and bake a pie which you donated to the Girl Scouts bake sale?"
- W: "No."
- A: "So you admit you murdered your neighbor!"
The question could not be answered with a simple "no" without the witness's implicitly confessing to the murder. Such a question, if asked at trial, would properly be subject to an objection for being compound.
Compound questions are a common feature in loaded questions such as "Are you still beating your wife?" The argument is phrased as a single question requiring a single answer, but actually involves two or more issues that cannot necessarily be accurately answered with a single response. By combining the questions "Are you currently beating your wife?" and "Have you ever beaten your wife?" one can make it impossible for someone who has never beaten his wife to answer the question effectively with a simple "yes" or "no." Instead, all questions must be answered. Therefore the innocent man should say, "I have never beaten my wife," making it clear that no wife beating has ever occurred.
Read more about this topic: Double-barreled Question
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or usage:
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“I am using it [the word ‘perceive’] here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word.”
—A.J. (Alfred Jules)