Do judges really care about perjury? Much of what I have read gives the impression that Judges expect the parties in a divorce to lie. But if the lie is persuasive, it prejudices the Court. I do not see pointing this out to a Judge would be helpful. If perjury carries a sanction or charge of a felony, surely the Judge will think it is relevant. As the trier of facts, how can this be ignored, especially if it can be proved?
Perjury is more than a lie It is a knowing deceit undertaken with the express purpose of misleading the court on a material issue. It isn’t misremembering, or contradicting oneself (or others), or stating falsehoods believing they are truths, or lying about things that don’t matter. The fact that one party’s recollection of events are different from another’s is not perjury, that’s just humans being human. Memory is neither accurate nor immutable; the mere act of recalling a memory changes that memory. This is particularly so if there is a strong personal investment in that memory - such as if it might help you win a court case, for example. This is such well-established science that even the legal profession understands it. Remember, if the capital T Truth was obvious to everyone, there wouldn’t be a judge involved at all except to rubber stamp the agreement. The role of the trier of fact is to engage with the contradictory evidence decide which they believe, which they don’t and which they are unsure about and then weigh that against the required standard of proof to see if the party bearing the onus of proof has met their evidentiary burden. When someone does actually commit perjury, you bet that judges care. Marcus Richard Einfeld (born 22 September 1938) is a former Australian judge who served on the Federal Court of Australia and was the inaugural president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. In retirement, he served two years in prison after being convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice. In summary, he lied on a Statutory Declaration in order to avoid a $77 speeding fine.
Judges don't have timesheet entries (and are often expressly excluded from FOIA obligations). They get paid salaries and are expected to work hard enough to clear their dockets in reasonable periods of time, however long that takes. If you wanted a more direct evidentiary estimate, you could estimate that a judge and his clerk together probably work 90-120 hours a week, figure out how many trials and hearings of what length were conducted and deduct that time spent on that from the total, and then divide the remaining hours by the number of opinions one can estimate that the judge wrote (or better yet, a reasonable estimate of the number of pages of opinions that one can estimate that the judge wrote). Typically, a lot of the legal research grunt work and more boilerplate parts of an opinion are written by the law clerk under some general instructions from the judge, with the judge writing the more substantive sections personally and heavily (or lightly, depending upon the quality of the law clerk) revising the draft opinion as a whole. The longer the opinion, the more likely it is that a substantial portion of it was written by the law clerk. For similar kinds of legal writing (e.g. appellate briefs and motions for summary judgment and proposed orders or written closing arguments) one to six hours per page from all professionals working on the document would be in the right ballpark. Judicial opinions come with some efficiencies, because once a judge decides a point of law or reaches a factual conclusion it doesn't have to be belabored in the same way that a litigant who isn't sure if their reasoning will be persuasive or not must. But, judicial opinions also typically have to spell out a greater proportion of legal and factual foundation for the end analysis that isn't hotly contested, will summarize all of the material points from the evidence presented in the case, and will frequently also recap in some detail the arguments made by the advocates for both sides of the case before actually engaging with those arguments in an analysis section. On balance, those factors probably pretty much balance out. If the judicial opinion is shorter, elegantly written, contains pithy turns of phrase, and/or contains lots of legal citations or factual analysis not raised by either party, it is probably closer to five or six hours per page or more. If the opinion is longer, has a rote and mechanical feel to it, and has very little factual analysis or references to law not mentioned by the parties, it is probably closer to one hour per page or even less. When some of these factors go one way, and other of these factors go the other way, it is probably in between in terms of hours per page. This said, sometimes it takes a judge a long time to write an opinion, but the end product is very short and elegant. In these situations, often what happened is that the judge and the judge's clerk spent lots and lots of hours writing a long and detailed first draft, then got an insight that provided a much more efficient and succinct way to reach a resolution to the case. In those circumstances, there would be dozens or scores of hours of work that went into the discarded first draft, only to be superseded by a half a dozen or dozen hours devoted to a much shorter final draft. In those cases, the final draft of the opinion might be ten or twenty hours per page or more once you include the time spent on the discarded draft. Of course, another factor is that some judges are just more efficient legal writers than others, and some judges have more familiarity with some areas of law than others. A opinion that might take one judge twenty hours to write might take another judge presiding over the very same case and producing an opinion of the same length and quality a hundred hours to write. The opinion in Meads v. Meads was 176 pages. If I had to make a best guess, I'd estimate that it probably took about 600 hours to write, probably about two-thirds of which was law clerk hours and probably about one-third of which was judge time.
I will address only the legal issues. Prosecutors for very good public policy reasons are not required to prosecute every crime they have suspicions about. When exercising this discretion they consider: Is the act, in fact, criminal - many of the things you list, while reprehensible, unethical, and possibly immoral are not actually criminal. Do they have the resources (time, staff, money) to collect the evidence and run this case as opposed to the thousands of other crimes out there. There are always more crimes than can be prosecuted and these have to be prioritised in some way. Do they have enough evidence to gain a conviction beyond reasonable doubt. People can be fired or resign on suspicion, they can't be convicted on it.
The general rule is that in the opening statement, the lawyer may describe what he expects the evidence and testimony to show: We will present Mr Smith, who will tell you that he saw the defendant miles away at the time of the crime But cannot make statements of fact as such. I don't see why this rule would be different for a pro se defendant. In a closing argument, as i understand the rule, the lawyer may and often will say things like "As witness X testified, there was no time to stop" but is not supposed to introduce new alleged facts not supported by the evidence. However, in a closing, a lawyer can and often does draw conclusions from facts supported by testimony. "My client was proved to have been in the next town 20 minutes earleri, so obviously he could not have committed the crime." Again, i don't see any reason why these rules would be different for someone acting pro se.
Prosecutions for falsely reporting rape are at least as common as perjury convictions (and usually don't count as perjury since the initial report is rarely made under oath), and even when charges are brought by prosecutors involving false statements made under oath, prosecutors tend to favor lesser misdemeanor false reporting charges over perjury charges. See, e.g., cases with news reports of such cases in Colorado and Wyoming on May 24, 2021, September 11, 2015, August 29, 2014, and March 18, 2008. This isn't to say that these cases are terribly common although they tend to generate headlines when they are brought. The State of Colorado commenced 1,801 felony sex offense cases in the 2021 fiscal year, for example, which was not atypical, and false reporting of sex offense cases are brought in Colorado maybe once every year or two. The conviction rate in sex offense cases that are prosecuted isn't 100%, but something on the order of 90%-95% of sex offense cases result in a guilty plea, and well over half of the remaining cases result in convictions at trial. As an order of magnitude estimate, perhaps one in fifty to one in two hundred cases where sex offense charges are pursued, but there is not a conviction, gives rise to false reporting charges against the alleged victim. Many acquittals and dismissals of charges that do occur are best characterized as cases where there is a reasonable doubt because jurors believe that it is reasonably possible that there may have been a good faith witness misidentification, or because charges were dismissed because a confession or evidence obtained in a search was unlawfully obtained and had to be suppressed. It would be very rare for a defendant to be acquitted (after a judge in a preliminary hearing found that probable cause was present) because the jury believed that the testimony of a victim was believed to be intentionally false, and there is no way to tell from the verdict itself that the jury reached this conclusion. The problematic aspect of charges of false reporting of sex offenses is the there have been famous instances of women being convicted for falsely reporting rape (see also here focusing on a different case), only to subsequently have the allegations for which the victims were punished confirmed to be true with DNA and other evidence. The number of cases where true allegations of sex offenses are made but not pursued because law enforcement finds the allegations to not be credible, almost surely greatly exceeds the number of cases where false reports of sex offenses are made to police, although this ratio varies greatly from one police department to another based upon the institutional culture of the police department in question.
The question should not include France and Germany, and should be limited to common law jurisdictions that are similar to India, because the function of judges differs starkly between adversarial vs. inquisitorial systems. The adversarial model pits two parties against each other, with the judge serving as the decider (of law, and perhaps of fact). The parties can offer witnesses, who can be compelled to respond to questions, and the attorney asking the question gets to control the question asked (subject to a possible objection by the other party, to be ruled on by the judge). The judge can rule on requests (which are not questions) i.e. petitions by either party. Otherwise, the judge sits there more or less mute, soaking up the argumentation being presented. Appellate proceedings are somewhat special in that the justices may address questions to the attorney, in order to better understand the logic of the proffered argument. The burden is on the attorney to make the case. There is no direct burden on the justice to &quot;make a case&quot;. The &quot;court of public opinion&quot; may be relevant in a jurisdiction where the justice is an elected office or is appointed for limited time. Or, the contrary opinion of a higher court may have some influence on a justice's rulings – this is not the case with a Supreme Court. In other words, it would be highly dysfunctional within the adversarial system for a party to be allowed to interrogate a judge. Formal petitions are allowed, as long as you follow proper form.
Judges do not decide, jurors do (however, if a judge is the fact-finder, then the judge makes such a determination). The main input that the decision-maker gets is a jury instruction. In order to unify "reasonable doubt", "reasonable price", "reasonable delay" and so on, appeal is often made a mythical being, "the reasonable man", so reasonable force would be the degree of force the reasonable man would use in a given situation. I will draw from California criminal instructions ('cuz I have them) but similar instructions can be found across jurisdictions. For example, one instructions says "A natural and probable consequence is one that a reasonable person would know is likely to happen if nothing unusual intervenes". Or from a negligence instruction "A reasonable person would have known that acting in that way would create such a risk". More detailed appeal to The Reasonable Person is found in the justified homicide instruction: Defendant’s belief must have been reasonable and (he/she) must have acted only because of that belief. The defendant is only entitled to use that amount of force that a reasonable person would believe is necessary in the same situation. If the defendant used more force than was reasonable, the [attempted] killing was not justified. When deciding whether the defendant’s beliefs were reasonable, consider all the circumstances as they were known to and appeared to the defendant and consider what a reasonable person in a similar situation with similar knowledge would have believed. If the defendant’s beliefs were reasonable, the danger does not need to have actually existed. The defendant’s belief that (he/she/ [or] someone else) was threatened may be reasonable even if (he/she) relied on information that was not true. However, the defendant must actually and reasonably have believed that the information was true. There is no explanation of what it means to be "a reasonable person". Since nobody believes that they themselves are unreasonable, a simple and also wrong way of judging the matter is to subjectively judge whether you yourself would do the same thing, if you were in that situation. Very often, instructions do not even bother to say what "reasonable" means, so (re interpreting expert testimony) "You may disregard any opinion that you find unbelievable, unreasonable, or unsupported by the evidence"; (re corpus delicti) "That other evidence may be slight and need only be enough to support a reasonable inference that a crime was committed"; "Also, before you may rely on circumstantial evidence to find the defendant guilty, you must be convinced that the only reasonable conclusion supported by the circumstantial evidence is that the defendant is guilty", "when considering circumstantial evidence, you must accept only reasonable conclusions and reject any that are unreasonable" The closest the law has come to articulating an objective characterization of "reasonableness" is in "reasonable doubt" instructions. One characterization is in People v. Feldman, 71 N.E. 2d 433. It is not a doubt based upon sympathy or a whim or prejudice or bias or a caprice, or a sentimentality, or upon a reluctance of a weak-kneed, timid, jellyfish of a juror who is seeking to avoid the performance of a disagreeable duty, namely, to convict another human being of the commission of a serious crime A somewhat improved characterization is the Calcrim instruction Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that leaves you with an abiding conviction that the charge is true. The evidence need not eliminate all possible doubt because everything in life is open to some possible or imaginary doubt There is room for improvement, but it points in the right direction. On rare occasions, a law is written that actually includes a definition. The Gas Price Spike Act HR 3784 said The term ‘reasonable profit’ means the amount determined by the Reasonable Profits Board to be a reasonable profit on the sale. It is then up to the board to subjectively determine what that profit is. (BTW this did not become law). [Addendum] It's actually very difficult to determine what reasoning judges use in those cases where they are the determiners of fact. They will likely call on their knowledge of law, asking "are these circumstances sufficiently like past circumstance A where the defendant was convicted, or more like B where the defendant was acquitted".
In a deposition, attorneys are supposed to keep their objections short and refrain from making an objection that indicates to the witness how he should answer. A question might be objectionable because it lacks foundation, because it is compound, because it calls for speculation, etc. Example 2, for instance, could be said to assume that Ms. Redacted was involved, and I might not want my client to discuss how he would act in that situation. Some attorneys in that situation might say, "Objection, assumes that Ms. Redacted had anything to do with this, which you haven't proved, and it's impossible to say what would have happened under circumstances that never happened." This gives my client a pretty clear signal that he ought to make clear that Ms. Redacted wasn't around, and that he should try to avoid getting pinned down on any questions about what he would have done if she had been. This practice -- known as "a speaking objection" -- can be used to signal to the witness how best to answer, and it leads to huge fights in a deposition. To avoid those fights, courts have developed a practice of requiring lawyers to simply "object to the form," rather than coaching the witness. That puts the objection on the record so it isn't waived, and if it's truly problematic, the parties have an opportunity to explain in greater detail after the deposition is concluded.