PREVALENCE OF PERJURY.

Hastings Standard, Issue 34, 5 June 1896, Page 2

PREVALENCE OF PERJURY.

Tin-: Crown Prosecutor of Dunedin has made a startling statement. According to him there was hardly an important case tried in any court in that part of the colony (Otago) in which perjury was not committed on one side or the other, and this attributed to the rarity of prosecutions for perjury. It is hard to take in this statement, and yet the Crown Prosecutor with his opportunities of judging cannot ho far astray in his views. He might have gone further and included the whole of the courts of the Colony in his indictment and yet have remained well within the circle of truth. After every Supreme Court sessions, indeed after every single trial, there have been hoard opinions from the public and street-talk fixing perjury to the credit of one or the other of the witnesses. The opinion of the Crown Prosecutor of Dunedin helps to give substance to the street gossip. Perjury is prevalent, and we cannot deny it. '• All men are liars " is a terse and brutal fact, yet the law requires that, when tnvin;/ eviilnno hi a Court of law, the evidence must be free from the dilution of falsehood. We must speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and presently we arc teased by cross-examination into making statements that are obviously untrue, or we are led by reexamination into pointing a new view of the case. How far counsel is responsible for perjured statements in our Law Courts in yet to be determined, but wo hazard the opinion that lawyers help in no small way to make perjurers. They may do so unconsciously perhaps, but that they are contributory agents to most eases of perjury is not an extravagant suggestion. Of course, there are some witnesses who deliberately tender false evidence, but do this so artfully that while we arc morally certain of perjury having been committed there arc no means of making a legal certainty of it. The prosecutions for perjury have not been many in this colony—only the most glaring cases have been brought to tria—land this may, as the Crown Prosecutor of. Dunedin says, account for the prevalence of perjuring. While there is much perjury of a criminal kind in our courts, there is not a little of the harmless perjury, which is clothed in the semblance of truth by the proviso " to the best of my knowledge and belief." It is a big subject is perjury, and so long as there are Law Courts will there be perjury ; but if we give more attention to the prosecution of false witnesses we will get more trustworthy evidence.