Why People Lie in Court
Government has made the bearing of false witness commonplace in the public square and even in courts.
A free people cannot long survive the corruption of their justice system, and no justice system can function properly once the people have been corrupted. This is self-evident: justice relies on establishment of the truth, and a widespread willingness to lie or to stretch the truth will make it impossible to do that.
John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) notes that there are strong positive incentives for people to lie in court and when making accusations in other forums. Lott quotes a law professor friend of the CPRC as noting that people routinely engage in “white lies” in everyday life when “the expected benefit of the lie outweighs the expected cost—if any—incurred by lying,” such as avoiding a scene by saying another person looks good.
This effect extends to people lying in court, because “people are rarely convicted of perjury and police are virtually never convicted, even though there is substantial evidence of them lying,” the law professor explains:
We need only extend these same ideas when considering why people lie in court: they think that they have more to gain from the lie than by telling the truth, and they perceive … very little risk of a prosecution for perjury. In criminal cases, the incentives may be accentuated: the criminal who turns “state’s evidence” to incriminate someone else in exchange for immunity or a reduced sentence faces almost no prospect of punishment for lying, so long as his or her testimony is sufficiently incriminating to the prosecutor’s preferred target.
Certainly the same is true in civil cases: if the local prosecutor has an animus against the person you’re lying about, he or she is unlikely to punish you for false testimony in a civil suit. This is especially the case when a prosecutor has repeatedly declared himself a sworn enemy of your target.
In another blog post, Lott notes that a recent study found 92% of child abuse accusations in Texas in 2022 were unsubstantiated, and that the percentage of false accusations may be even higher than that. “For those worried about people using the legal system to be vindictive or to harm innocent people, the extremely high false accusation rate here should be a concern,” Lott writes.
The same process applies to accusations made through the press: if the most powerful media voices are united in opposition against the person you are accusing, they will broadcast your assertion widely and without questioning it, to the considerable benefit of your reputation, and they will suppress any stated doubts about your claims, greatly reducing your risk of exposure as a liar.
As the child abuse example illustrates, the consequences for the accused can be ruinous, while the accuser faces no risk at all.
Prosecutors’ willingness to turn a blind eye to false accusations, and the increasing use of anonymous or otherwise-protected informants, intensify the corruption of the nation’s legal system and its use as a weapon against those perceived as enemies of the state.