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IT’S TIME FOR CITIZEN ACTION!

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The following (edited) essay, Every Citizen’s Civil Right (the original of which was sent to every federal district court judge and federal circuit court of appeals judge in the nation) offers several potential solutions.

Every Citizen’s Civil Right

The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is quoted as saying , "If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."

Sissila Bok wrote a book titled LYING and provided exquisite reasoning about both the problem and the too prevalent practice of lawyers eliciting and/or building on false testimony in courts. Her analysis should be required reading for all law students as well as, possibly, those professors who teach trial law and/or litigation techniques. The manner in which a significant number of attorneys handle lying under oath by their clients or their witnesses makes our adversarial legal system merely a game which is, in part, responsible for destroying much of the public’s confidence in and respect for both the legal profession and "the law" itself.

Current laws penalizing lawyers’ eliciting false testimony and submitting false documents to a court are not sufficiently effective in discouraging these acts. Mrs. Bok closes her thoughtful discussion of attorneys’ embracing this practice with Judge Marvin E. Frankel’s statement:

(…)our adversary system rates truth too low among the values that institutions of justice are meant to serve. (…)(O)ur more or less typical lawyer selected as a trial judge experiences a dramatic change in perspective as he moves to the other side of the bench. (emphasis added)

Yale Law School put into effect a requirement that all law students must take a course in ethics,and other law schools have instituted this same requirement, which is reported to have followed the so-called Watergate episode in our recent history – and which, surprisingly, involved the full and willing participation of a number of attorneys.

Law schools would further better serve the citizenry as well as the legal profession itself by their instituting a requirement that all applicants must take an MMPI test (or a more pertinent character profile test) in addition to the currently required LSAT. Any applicants who also lack those innate qualities required to shoulder the burdens of ethical legal practice would then be guided into income producing endeavors more suited to each applicant’s personal needs and wishes without risking further damage to the public’s trust in our justice system. In addition, this requirement could, in time, raise citizen’s often skewed perception and resultant low opinion and distrust of attorneys at law - -as well as of our justice system.

When law school graduates pass the bar examination and are licensed as attorneys at law to practice in the public domain, they then also become officers of the court. However, false testimony can perpetrate a fraud upon the court itself - even though the courts are the core or heart of our justice system with a responsibility in our constitution to guarantee all citizens all of their rights and privileges as citizens - and certainly a fair trial is more than just a privilege but a right in this the most advanced democracy on the globe. (Note the Preamble - the 9^th and 14^th Amendments to our constitution.)

A primary responsibility of our courts is to ensure that all court actions are both legal and just to all concerned - defendants, plaintiffs, and "the people" of any state. Thus, at the federal level, also, our ignoring the damage false testimony can wreak - not only on any litigant but also on our justice system itself is anomalous - - - inconsistent with that justice system’s avowed intent. Belittling the damage that aiding false swearing does to a true quest for justice is on a par with ignoring the true effectiveness of the rack which men of good intentions relied on for centuries. Our nation holds itself out to the world as a role model for ethical standards and insists it has a consistent commitment to the protection of all its citizens. Yet - we do not have an unequivocal, nationally enforceable tool (i.e., a federal law) which accentuates the constant - even absolute necessity for these licensed, professional servants of any U.S. citizen to fulfill a primary obligation --- i.e., to honor and adhere to those ethical standards and to that social commitment in all of their professional actions before any court in our nation. Without such an articulated, nationwide assurance and commitment, one might say we have, however inadvertently or innocently, earned such epithets as The Great Satan.

Trial lawyers’ maintaining the too prevalent (sub rosa) position that even eliciting false testimony in courts helps bring out the truth in our adversarial legal system is a practice that cries out to be examined - to be subjected to scholarly, in depth research. This tacit philosophy of action may well prove to be a mere self-serving sophistry that eases the consciences of attorneys who must learn to function professionally in an amoral court environment.

Further, when states put a brief time limit (a statute of limitations) on their ability to hold accountable attorneys at law (officers of their courts who presumably are held to a "higher" standard) who suborn false testimony in a court action, that time limitation can, in practice, result in further victimizing the injured; it cements the denial of that fair trial to the lawyer’s opponent while protecting this possibly guilty lawyer. Bearing false witness is, after all, an act that is specifically prohibited in both the Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Koran - indeed, in probably all the texts revered as immutable (and thus deemed sacred) by all the world’s various peoples. That edict - indeed "law" - is both prior to and superior to any more recently formulated rules supporting concepts such as the guillotine-like "finality of judgment."

In the context, therefore, of both clarifying and then fostering more ethical practice in all members of our nation’s legal profession, the establishment of federal penalties for this malignant practice of lawyers in any court in any state would accentuate the absolute necessity for truthful and accurate testimony and documents if our justice system is going to save itself from being a gross misnomer - - - a farce negating the only legitimate reason trials are held in the first place - - - i.e., to establish truth and seek justice.

Establishing such federal penalties for those attorneys at law (as officers of our courts) who "suborn"(aid/elicit) false testimony and/or submit false documents in any court in any state on the basis of the fact that such acts violate any citizen’s civil right (e.g., Rodney King and the U.S. versus Officer Koon et al) to a fair trial, may well be what our nation needs to make our touted justice system work, at long last, as it was truly intended to do - - - to seek and nurture "… justice for all."

The events abstracted above (i.e., the "CALL") are what led first to formulating this essay.

Read - Hugh Murray’s essays on HVM Legal Ethics and Reform

Also - Dr. Ernest Gilbert’s IMPEACHMENT of the HONEST WITNESS

and the interview of a former Texas Assistant Attorney General, Erik Moebius, on the "AntiShyster" web site

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Citizens Against Lying Lawyers

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