What happens if an expert witness admits he lied in a case This happened in in 2004, in Germany, in a very small town. I don’t speak the language and relied on my English speaking lawyer and my bilingual gf. On the night before the court date, my lawyer told me he wouldn’t represent me anymore because the strategy i wanted to pursue would create damages and he didn’t want to be a part of it. To make a long story short, it would question the skills and reliability of two city workers. I showed up in court, no lawyer, I explained what happened and asked for a continuation and the judge refused. So the whole proceedings happened without me having a lawyer present. There was a semi fluent translator present for me. Then an expert witness was present and essentially delivered a testimony against me, which, in my eyes didn’t make sense. The whole then happened very quickly and I lost the case. As time passed and more people talked, it turns out that, in this small city, everyone knows everyone, went to school together, etc. One policeman even told me that even though I’m right, I can’t win the case in that locality. More than 10 years passed and the expert witness contacted me via a very long letter explaining me that he lied in the testimony because he was engaged in a relation with the plaintiff. He said he felt remorseful and manipulated.. in practice their relation fell apart and he decided it would be a good time to tell the truth. This whole ordeal ended up with a bill of roughly €70k of court ordered payements. Since the judgement was obviously a joke, and I had gone back to California, I never paid anything. This resulted in an arrest warrant in Germany; I eventually went back to another EU country where Germany tried to collect money, but failed, as in face of the new evidence, the local court didn’t want to apply the German judgement. Now.. I will need soon to go to Germany, so I talked to a lawyer. I was told me that it’s too late to modify the judgement and the only thing I can do is negotiate a payment plan. As the proof from the expert witness came a decade later, it can’t be used. Obviously, I find the whole ordeal infuriating because I do not understand how evidence can be willfully ignored, but not the penalties. Are there any precedents, in German law, where new evidence came very late and would invalidate a judgment?
TL;DR: You may have chances. Consult a German lawyer fast. In German civil cases there is the possibillity of "Reopening of proceedings" (Wiederaufnahme des Verfahrens), §§ 578 ff. ZPO. It can be used in special cases of incorrect proceedings. You have an "Action for retrial of the case" (Restitutionsklage), if "in a testimony or report on which the judgment was based, the witness or experts violated their obligation to tell the truth, such violation being liable to prosecution", § 580 n. 3 ZPO. The lie of the expert witness seems to be prosecutable as "False unsworn testimony" (Uneindliche Falschaussage, § 153 StGB). This crime is under Limitation on prosecution (Verjährung § 78 StGB). Nevertheless it is a reason for reopening. There are short periods for filing such an action, § 586 ZPO. It has to be within one month after knewing of the cause for rescission. If you expired this period without fault, you may get "restoriation of the status quo ante" (Wiedereinsetzung in den vorigen Stand, §§ 233ff. ZPO). But again there is a very short period after you are able to file the action. The wording of § 586 II 2 ZPO excludes reopening after five years. But this clause is reduced in practice, if enforcement is still possible (Braun, in: Münchener Kommentar zur ZPO, 5. Auflage 2016, § 586 Rn. 4). So it does not apply in your case. So you may have an action for retrial of the case, but only if you act now fast. For the details, esp. when the periods begin to run in your case, please consult a German lawyer. You may also have a case against the expert whitness and/or the plaintiff because of fraud in the process (Prozessbetrug) and/or § 839a BGB about the liability of court-appointed experts. As the judgement is about €70k the I assume the process was at a "Landgericht". It is not possible to negotiate there without a lawyer. I don't know if it is a cause for rescission, that the judge didn't gave you a chance to get a new lawyer and proceeded without your lawful representative.
The appeals court has found that the county court judge made a decision that was consistent with the evidence that was presented at trial. As such, the decision is sound. It appears that the defendant tried to present additional/different evidence or different arguments about the law in the appeal than they did at trial - this is not permitted. As to responsibility, the defendant and their legal team were responsible for deciding how to run their case and what evidence to present and what arguments to run. What evidence to present and how to present it and what submissions to make on the law is a tactical decision for each party. You can get it wrong. That doesn't let you try again on appeal. If your barrister has been negligent, and that directly caused you to lose, you can sue your barrister. In terms of interpreting a particular paragraph of a judgement, the appeals court may or may not make comment on a particular paragraph but the reasons, while important, are not really subject to interpretation other than that. A judgement will give orders, these should be very precise and not open to interpretation - things like &quot;the defendant will pay X to the plaintiff&quot; or &quot;the case is dismissed&quot; etc.
When a complaint is first file, per case law, courts have a duty to believe each allegation you make on information and belief as long as they are each not contradicting any other statement or other evidence present at the time of filing. This isn't true. The court doesn't have to actually believe you. The court merely has to assume for sake of argument that the things said are true for the narrow purpose of evaluating whether they describe a legal wrong in a formal sense. Also, under modern federal pleading rules in the U.S., the judge doesn't have to believe you and can dismiss your complaint if it is not &quot;plausible.&quot; Your attorney has a duty to not merely assume that everything that a client tells the lawyer is true. In federal court, the governing rule is Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11, which states that when an attorney files and signs a document in court that the attorney: certifies that to the best of the person's knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances: (1) it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass, cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation; (2) the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law; (3) the factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, will likely have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery; and (4) the denials of factual contentions are warranted on the evidence or, if specifically so identified, are reasonably based on belief or a lack of information. The California state law obligations is more or less identical in substance, although the procedural rules of California are codified differently than the federal rules. So, a lawyer is required to reasonably inquire into whether the client is telling the lawyer the truth about the client's motives and about the facts. It is a breach of the lawyer's duties to the court and the profession to simply take what a client tells the lawyer at face value, accepting it uncritically.
I finally found the actual transcript of the voir dire part of the case mentioned in the question. http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2012090614295190 As can be evidenced from the transcript, the judge has specifically instructed the two jurors working as engineers at the local tech companies that they'd have to &quot;forget&quot; what they know about both the software engineering and the patent law itself, too, starting their work on the whole case with a completely clean sheet, using a very simple criteria for making decisions: One side or the other is going to have the burden of proof on -- one side has the burden of proof on some issues, the other side has the burden of proof on other issues. When you go into the jury room to deliberate after you've tried your hardest to understand the evidence, if they haven't educated you on it or if they haven't persuaded you, the party with the burden of proof loses. It's that simple. You don't have to -- you have to make a good faith effort to understand it, but if the party with the burden of proof has failed to do that, the party with the burden of proof loses. That's the standard. You have to -- you, the jury, decide. Now, what you cannot do is bring to bear something that you've learned in some other case, some other patent case, about how some piece of equipment works or something like that. You can't do that. It has to be based on the record here. Then, after a short break and a consultation with the lawyers, where Oracle seems to have expressed some concern to having the computer experts be on the panel, which subsequently prompted the judge to declare the following to the two potential jurors who worked at Cisco and HP: So this is really going to be directed at both of you, but, you know, you come to the party, so to speak, with some prior training that bears upon the subject matter we're going to be hearing a lot about here. That's okay. That's not disqualifying, but you -- it's okay to use your common sense when you render a verdict, but you cannot add to the record in court something that you know about the way software programming works that the witnesses didn't actually testify to. You see what I'm saying? You've got to decide the record -- the case based on the record made here as opposed to adding into it what else you may have known about the way programming and software works. Since both jurors had so much software and patent experience that they couldn't disregard it easily, they were thus both excused (page 95 of 224). All right. I think it would be too hard for you to sit in this case and sort out what you knew already against what is proven or not proven here, and itwould not be fair to the parties to have that extra burden even though you two actually know something about the subject. It's in a way too bad, but it's for the best. So you two are excused to go back to the jury assembly room. Thank you. The other instructions that the judge gives to the potential jurors is also worth reading (starts on page 36 of 224) The full transcript is at http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-942.pdf. In summary -- jurors are only allowed to talk to one another when the deliberation process starts, and, no, they are not allowed to bring any &quot;baggage&quot; to the case at stake.
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.
Cohen has ethical problems, but this is probably pretty far down the list. If he were lying about the law, though, that could be treated as a violation of Rule 4.1 of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct: In the course of representing a client, a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of fact or law to a third person. It could also be a violation of Rule 8.4: A lawyer or law firm shall not ... (c) engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation; Although these would be violations of his ethical obligations, they probably do not rise to the level of seriousness that would result in any meaningful punishment. Disbarment would be extremely unlikely, though a censure is conceivable. If someone reported the offense, I would actually expect that the state would decline to investigate at all. Of course, all of this assumes that he was deliberately lying about the state of the law, which I think overestimates his competence. More likely, he's just an idiot and didn't know that he was wrong. Importantly, being wrong about the law isn't unethical; it's a presumption at the foundation of our adversarial justice system.
Basically, it is up to the court. The relevant law is the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE). You don't give much in the way of specifics, but it sounds like you confessed something to the police at the side of the road immediately after the accident, and now wish to dispute that confession. If you are taken to court and the police want to introduce your confession as evidence then you (through your lawyer) can ask the court to rule it out. You may be able to do so on a number of grounds. Was the confession properly recorded at the time? Were you treated in an oppressive manner, such that you felt you had to say what the police wanted to hear. Did you think you might get more favourable treatment if you said what the police wanted? For instance, did you think you might be allowed to go home once they were satisfied? Were you given a proper rest, or were you in a mental state that might cause you to say things without understanding the consequences (it sounds like this would be your main argument, but consider the others too). [Edit] If you needed medical treatment that would also be relevant. Were you properly cautioned (that speech beginning "You do not have to say anything...") before the police asked you questions. If you think you may be facing criminal charges then you should get yourself a lawyer sooner rather than later. A lawyer will know all about this and be able to navigate the relevant legal processes on your behalf. A bit of background: back in the 1970s the police frequently attributed incriminating statements to suspects when arrested, such as "Its a fair cop, guv", or "Who ratted on us?". The rules in PACE were made to stop such "verballing".
Yes. Juries aren't terribly accurate. There is an irreducible chance that no matter how clear the outcome should be that the jury will get it wrong. Based upon a review of the academic literature on wrongful convictions and inaccurate acquittals, I generally tell my clients that this is about 10%. Many people think that this is a low end estimate. Also, sometimes a jury will acquit a defendant in a case where they think that the defendant was actually legally guilty because of extraordinary circumstances, and so the jury will disregard the law and acquit. This practice is called &quot;jury nullification.&quot; And, as other answers have noted, sometimes the prosecution or the judicial system screws up for reasons that are unforeseeable, after a not guilty plea, in a way that makes proving your guilt difficult or impossible. Basically, if you &quot;roll the dice&quot; there is some non-zero chance you will be acquitted, while if you plead guilty, there is none. Also, sometimes court decisions will change the law in way favorable to you after the trial, and as long as your case is still on direct appeal from the conviction, you can benefit from those changes in the law, which you cannot if you simply plead guilty without any concessions. Likewise, if you are innocent and the evidence is currently strongly against you, but you wish to preserve the ability to later attack the conviction based upon future newly discovered evidence, not pleading guilty is generally necessary to preserve that option. Another circumstance where going to trial but losing can still be worth it, is where there are extenuating circumstances that make your conduct understandable, even if it is not a legally valid defense. Getting these facts in front of the judge in a fuller fashion, as a trial can make possible, can convince the judge that while you are legally guilty, that you deserve leniency. Going to trial typically results in a longer sentence, even without a plea bargain, however, so going forward with a hopeless trial is rarely a good move.