Court Opinion

ID: 9663135
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 23:28:51.766247+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:45.975371
License: Public Domain

REYNOLDSON, Chief Justice
(dissenting)-
I would reverse on the ground trial court erred in overruling defendants’ objections to the rebuttal testimony concerning plaintiff’s character for truthfulness.
It is the acknowledged and traditional role of lawyers in our adversary system of administering justice to seek out and reveal untruthfulness in the testimony of adverse witnesses. The result of this case is to hold that if the lawyers are successful, the discredited witness is given a final opportunity, in trial court’s discretion, to nonetheless rehabilitate his or her character as a truthful person. The process encumbers and extends the trial and ordinarily would scramble the lawyers in a search for rebuttal and surrebuttal witnesses, on both sides of the proposition, to provide general testimony that has nothing to do with the facts of the case.
Whatever the “or otherwise” language may mean in Iowa Rule of Evidence 608(a), I would hold it does not open the door for such testimony in the circumstances disclosed by this record.
LARSON, SCHULTZ, and CARTER, JJ., join this dissent.