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JUDGEВ’S QUESTIONING AND REFORMULATING STRATEGIES IN THE ROMANIAN COURTROOM

M. A. Farcasiu

Abstract

This paper focuses on the judge-witness interaction in the Romanian courtroom, namely on the questioning and reformulating strategies used by the judge in the Romanian courtroom. In the Romanian courtoom (belonging to the inquisitorial system of justice), the judge is actively involved in determining the facts of the case, while the judge in an adversarial system is an impartial referee of the prosecution and defendant pleading their cases before a jury who determines the facts of the case. If judges have a passive role in an adversarial system ensuring the fair play of the trial as the lawyers control and conduct most of the trial, in an inquisitorial system, the judge is quite active, and it is the lawyers who have a more passive role. The judge in the Romanian courtroom is the only person asking questions to the witness and the mediator between the lawyer and the witness. In the inquisitorial system, lawyers ask questions only through the intermediary of the judge. Therefore, the judge uses a lot of questioning strategies trying to elicit responses from the witness, e.g. multi-unit questions or unfinished questions. Another characteristic of the Romanian witness examination is that the Romanian judge must reformulate the witnessВ’s oral story and transform it into a written statement that is typed by the court clerk and then signed by the witness.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2017/12/S02.068

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