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Comment by freerobby | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: in California and Idaho, it is a capital crime to commit perjury that results in a wrongful execution.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/crimes-punishable-death-penalty

Perjury seems to be a separate crime from withholding evidence, somehow I doubt any prosecutor would ever be found guilty in this situation.

As far as I can tell from the relevant (I believe) 18USC §1621 [0], the failure to volunteer information is not perjury; it requires actively providing information you do not believe to be true.

That would, in my non-lawyer eyes, make it incredibly hard to convict anyone of perjury as it seems you'd need to prove what was going on in the mind of the accused at the time, and good luck with that.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1621

Would not the swearing in, where you promise to tell the whole truth be where you perjure yourself, if you withhold evidence?

Witnesses are under oath, not the prosecution.

Curious, in my country, before being allowed to speak in a criminal court, witnesses, defense and prosecution must all take the oath.

Should the prosecutor not be held to higher standards?

One simple solution would be to have prosecutors swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are not withholding evidence.

That would be interesting; I wonder how courts would treat a voluntary sworn statement vs. absolute immunity. (A bit of an academic question; getting judges to do this would never happen in the US.)

Is perjury actively lying or also withholding exonerating evidence?

Rather than just if it results in execution, you'd think perjury resulting in jail time should mean the person lying should face the same jail term as the defendant.

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