Questioning Oneself: Direct Examination of a Self-Represented Defendant

I was reading a WRAL article about the District Attorney wife-hiring trial taking place in Raleigh when the following passage caught my attention: “Superior Court Judge Paul Ridgeway said that, if [former District Attorney] Wallace Bradsher testifies, he cannot simply deliver a monologue from the witness stand and must pose questions to himself to give prosecutors a chance to object to potential testimony.” I hadn’t previously considered how testimony from a self-represented defendant would work. I looked into it, and this post summarizes what I learned. A judge may require the defendant to use a question-and-answer format. Every appellate case I could find affirmed a trial judge’s authority to require a defendant to testify in question and answer format. The most-cited case is United States v. Nivica, 887 F.2d 1110 (1st Cir. 1989), where the trial judge told a defendant that if he chose to represent himself and to testify, “you have to ask yourself questions. . . . You have to say, Mr. Wellington, what is your name. And then you say my name is Mark Wellington. . . . You cannot get on the stand and simply narrate your story.” The reviewing court noted that this procedure was “cumbersome,” but not so “unwieldy that it constructively deprived [the defendant] of . . . his right to testify in his own defense.” See also State v. Curley, 2016 WL 2596404 (Super. Ct. N.J. App. Div. May 6, 2016) (unpublished) (collecting cases; noting that the “[d]efendant has not cited any reported [...]