Objection! Non-responsive!

Lawyers have many tools in their toolkit to object to witness statements. They know when a witness is avoiding the question. Jesus did, too.

Turn on your TV at any given time of the day, and there's a pretty good chance you'll find a rerun of Law and Order (or some other courtroom procedural drama) somewhere on a back channel of your cable feed. In fact, if aliens are really out there in the universe somehow getting our television signals, we wouldn't fault them for thinking that we're primarily a race of cops and lawyers who spend most of their time interviewing or cross-examining witnesses.

We've watched so much courtroom TV that we're all well-versed in the lingo. Without Law and Order, we might not know what "exculpatory evidence" means, or what constitutes an especially "heinous" crime. We wouldn't know what it means to "badger" a witness. We wouldn't know when a witness is testifying to "hearsay" conversations. We're so used to hearing phrases like this that we might think we really know how to navigate a courtroom ourselves using as our legal mentors lawyers like, for example, Jack "Hang 'Em High" McCoy, Perry...