A Few Good Men...a question about perjury.

Cafe Society
61

Just watched the scene again - we see Kaffee ask only one question:

“Private I want you tell us one last time, why did you go to Private Santiago’s room on the night of September 6?”

Clearly there was a lot of testimony beforehand that we didn’t get to see.

Plus, Downey’s reaction is all wrong if he was dancing on the “I never said I was there when Kendrick gave the order” line. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have gotten so panicked when proof came out that he wasn’t there when Kendrick gave the order. I really don’t think there’s any other way to interpret that whole exchange.

62

Man, how great was the guy who played Dawson as a calmly knowledgeable Marine? And how great was the guy who played Downey as an easily-confused moron?

And would we remember this movie so fondly if their races were reversed?

63

I just watched the relevant scenes I quoted a few posts ago, and those transcripts are exactly correct. Specifically Dawson said “He ordered us to give Santiago a code red”, and later Downey said “He ordered me and Lance Corporal Dawson to give Willy a code red.” Both of them are clearly, obviously, lying to their own lawyers. Maybe Downey is just following Dawson’s lead, but there’s no way on Earth Dawson didn’t deliberately lie.

Luckily the movie was on AMC today, so I recorded it.

64

He was a non actor in his first roll. They were having trouble finding their Dawson and they said ‘someone who looks like him.’ Then they had him give a reading. In the DVD extras he says that when he looks scared it’s because he is scared; in the room with all that star power. How cool is that.

65

Thanks for posting the script.

In re-reading it, there is no lie in that script.

Dawson says “Lt. kendrick ordered us to give Pt. Santiago a code red.”

That is true. Even if Downie wasn’t there, the order from Kendrick being directed only at Dawson is accurate. Kendrick says to Dawson - “I want you and Dowey to give him a code red.”

So Dawson’s being truthful to his attorneys.

Downey is also being truthful, as he is told by Dawson what Kendrick said.

When Downey and Dawson both refer to “their room”, that is truthful. They were roomates, so “their room” is accurate, even if Downey wasn’t there to actually hear Kendrick in person.

Downey doesn’t even lie on the stand. He says he was “ordered to give a code red by Kendrick,” but when Ross drills down, he tells the truth. The order came feom Dawson. But he had no reason to believe Dawson was taking it upon himself to tive Santiago a code red. As corporal Barnes pointed out under oath, he wanted to give Santiago a code red, but he knew he couldn’t because Dawson would “kick his butt.” Clearly, it was known in the platoon that Dawson was protecting Santiago from reprisals, so Downey would have easily concluded that order came from above. Kendrick gave the order to Dawson, just like Dawson said.

Kaffee screwed up by not checking the story.
And my skeptical side says that Kendrick survived this. Because he probably can say "I never used the words “Code Red”, thereby making perjury impossible to convict him on. It boils down to his word against Dawson’s, a Marine who has just been dishonorably discharged. A good lawyer could get him off of the perjury charge unless there was a recording.

66

I don’t think Downey would have easily concluded anything. He wasn’t the sharpest bayonet in the armory.

67

Yeah, that’s a very ticky-tack lawyerly take on what happened. Sure, Dawson could have said “I never said Downey was in the room with me at the time, and Downey never said he was there either.” But it’s obvious Dawson was perfectly happy in letting his lawyers believe Downey was there.

We all went to our rooms.
Lt. Kendrick came to our room.
Lt. Kendrick ordered us to give
Santiago a Code Red.

Any rational person would take that to mean that Dawson and Downey were both there. Claiming that that’s the “truth” is legalistic bullshit. If Dawson wanted to make it clear only he there, he would have said something like:

Lt. Kendrick ordered me to take Downey and give Santiago a code red.

And in the end, it didn’t matter. The jury, the judge, and everyone else in the court assumed that Downey had been caught in a lie. There was no coming back from that. Trying to say “Oh, he didn’t technically lie” to a bunch of fellow military members would have made things worse, not better.

And if Downey wasn’t lying, why did he panic when Ross pointed out he couldn’t have been in his room at 1620? He would have just said “Oh no sir, look at my testimony, I never said I was physically present.” Instead, he now told the truth - that his superior, Lance Corporal Harold Dawson USMC gave him an order, and he followed it.

68

I agree with your point. But we are talking about lawyers.

I used to think rational people knew what the meaning of the word “is” is. But after listening to Bill Clinton parse and squeeze words, I realized that a good lawyer’s job is to twist vocabulary like a rubik’s cube.

69

It’s not a lawyerly tack. It’s what the movie flat out told us. I quoted what Galloway said. We are supposed to believe that Downey did not lie. There’s no other reason to include that line, except to tell the audience so we don’t think they’re liars.

The script goes out of its way to avoid actually having them say they were in the room, and I think there’s a reason for that. At no other point in the movie do they bring up the idea that it might be lying.

I honestly think it completely changes the movie, to be honest. The message at the end is that, even though they followed all orders, they still were discharged for not standing up for their fellow Marine. While, sure, adding in lying might humanize them, it detracts from that message.

With all that stuff about how orders must be followed, I really do think we’re supposed to believe that neither of them considered the significance of Downey not hearing the order directly. I think that, if we were supposed to think about him lying, there would be talk about that somewhere else in the movie, instead of a line telling us that it’s not a lie.

70

Look, here’s what happened:

Dawson told the 3 lawyers that Kendrick ordered him and Downey to give Santiago a code red. He clearly meant they were both present. If you can read that transcript above, and listen to the scene, and think otherwise, you’re nuts. The script doesn’t “go out of it’s way to avoid actually having them say they were in the room” - any reasonable person, hearing that description, would believe Dawson meant Downey was with him.

The lawyers decided to base their defense around that. They planned to have Downey and Dawson testify that Kendrick ordered them to give the code red, even after the one witness who could have corroborated the story killed himself. At any time during that process, Dawson could have said “Wait, Downey wasn’t actually with me”, and they would have completely changed their strategy. He chose not too. Dawson wasn’t a dumb farmboy like Downey, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Downey testified that a code red was ordered by his platoon commander, Lt. Kendrick. When Ross showed he couldn’t possibly have been there, he changed his testimony, and said that Dawson had ordered him to give Santiago a code red. He did not say “Dawson passed along the order from Kendrick”, which is what he would have said if that’s what he thought his testimony was actually saying.

Clearly, everyone, Kaffee, Galloway, Ross, Dawson, the judge, the jury, believed that Downey’s testimony (before Ross caught him) was that he was in the room when Kendrick gave the order. Sure, in the post-mortem Galloway tries grasping at straws that it’s somehow recoverable, but she never actually says “it’s not a lie”. If you can find anyone saying “It’s not a lie”, BigT, please cite it.

At best, I’ll admit Downey told the lie that Dawson wanted him to. But whether Downey was lying on his own hook, or just doing whatever Dawson said to do, it was still a lie that almost got them both hanged.

71

Markinson wasn’t dead when they were preparing their line of defense, or when Downey was caught in his lie (at least, they didn’t know yet; it’s sort of implied that he kills himself during the court proceedings).

72

Sir?

Well you see sir, there, there was a blowout.

73

Well played.