I recently caught a police officer in a lie on the stand in a court trial where he testified that he remembered my client’s eyes were dilated and wrote that in a police report. The ambulance report made three readings at the same time, all non-dilated. The judge (it was a court trial) did nothing about it. So he perjured himself and submitted a false police report to discredit my client.
Let’s take Ohio for instance, in part;
2921.11 Perjury.
(A) No person, in any official proceeding, shall knowingly make a false statement under oath or affirmation, or knowingly swear or affirm the truth of a false statement previously made, when either statement is material.
Official proceeding includes Civil Court.
Is lying in testimony before a Grand Jury also subject to perjury charges?
I’m thinking of the Ferguson, MO case, where some witnesses testified that policeman Wilson stood over Brown and fired several shots into his back – all 3 autopsies, the physical evidence, etc. prove this to be completely false. Could these witnesses be charged with perjury?
They can be charged, but they won’t be convicted simply because their evidence was wrong; it has to have been subjectively dishonest.
Eyewitness testimony is not very reliable. It’s extremely common for honest eyewitnesses to have vivid memories of things which simply did not happen. That’s not enough to secure a perjury conviction. Usually to convict someone of perjury you will need a confession, or evidence that he knew his testimony to be false, e.g. he gave a different, true version of events to to someone else on another occasion.