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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (7634)	2/18/1998 6:12:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

It has come to my attention that Vincent Bugliosi is running around shilling some book. Heard he was on TV last night with renown legal scholar Geraldo, agreeing with the host that since no one is prosecuted for perjury, why should the Prez be held to any standard? Well, they are wrong: February 18, 1998 The Perjury Loophole By STEPHEN GILLERS Perjury in civil cases is virtually never prosecuted." Who said that? I did. And so did dozens of other purported experts when members of the news media asked us if Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel for Whitewater, would be looking into whether President Clinton and Monica S. Lewinsky lied under oath in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. We were wrong. Ask Millard F. McAfee. Mr. McAfee was a defendant in a civil lawsuit in Lubbock, Tex. After that case was settled, the Federal prosecutor charged him with making "false declarations" at the deposition in his civil case. In a 1993 opinion affirming Mr. McAfee's conviction, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected the argument that because civil depositions were "less formal," lying at them did not break the law. Or ask Carol W. Donathan. A defendant in a sexual harassment case paid Ms. Donathan $20,000 to testify in his favor. The defendant was cooperating with the authorities, who secretly taped their conversations. In 1995, Ms. Donathan was convicted in a Kentucky Federal court of selling her testimony and sentenced to a year in prison. "You could look it up," Casey Stengel once said, and that's what we experts should have done before presuming to decriminalize civil court perjury. If we had looked it up, we would have discovered the Donathan and McAfee cases, among others. When I did a belated computer search, narrowly limited to Federal appellate opinions, I found eight prosecutions in civil cases since 1993 for lying, or for trading testimony for payment. These cases show that prosecutors do pursue civil court perjury if they know about it and get cooperation. While eight cases might not sound like a lot, my search excluded older cases, cases in which convictions were not appealed or the defendant pled guilty, cases in which the defendant was prosecuted for crimes related to perjury -- like obstruction of justice -- and state court cases, where most such prosecutions actually occur. One of these cases also contained one of the strongest judicial condemnations of civil court perjury. David Wayne Holland was convicted in Georgia of lying in an affidavit and deposition. The judge gave him a reduced sentence after concluding that civil court perjury was less serious than lying in criminal cases. But in 1994, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit disagreed. "We categorically reject any suggestion, implicit or otherwise, that perjury is somehow less serious when made in a civil proceeding," Chief Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote. "Perjury, regardless of the setting, is a serious offense that results in incalculable harm to the functioning and integrity of the legal system as well as to private individuals." Congress sees things the same way. Federal laws don't distinguish between perjury in civil cases and perjury in criminal cases, and the statutes are so tightly written that they seem redundant. For example, asking someone to lie under oath is a crime. So is offering, or asking for, "anything of value" in exchange for testimony. Merely trying to persuade someone to "withhold testimony," to "conceal an object" or "be absent from an official proceeding" is criminal when the aim is to suppress evidence. These overlapping laws give Mr. Starr many options with which to pursue any individuals possibly involved in misconduct. That would include those who may have helped reward false testimony, those who encouraged others to hide gifts that had been subpoenaed and the mystery muse behind the talking points that Ms. Lewinsky delivered to Linda Tripp. People caught in this statutory web can't plausibly claim that they are being singled out for conduct that is virtually never prosecuted. They're not being singled out. They can look it up. Stephen Gillers is a law professor at New York University. nytimes.com