IS PERJURY EVERYWHERE IN OUR SOCIETY?

A week before the Senate deliberated what exactly the term perjury meant,
"Frontline," on PBS, ran a documentary ("Snitch") on informants. An
important player in it was lawyer Eric Sterling, a very angry man who is
president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. Mr. Sterling maintains
that, in some circles, perjury is the "coin of the realm;" that perjury
goes on is also by trial judges who protect themselves with ritual
disclaimers.

It is, of course, a standard technique of advocacy to attempt to discredit
the witness - the informant, in the "Snitch" documentary. If in this
endeavor you do not succeed, then invite the jury to stall over the
conundrum, before declaring guilt or innocence. What do you do when there
is a division of opinion?

Last Wednesday's defense advocate in the Senate, Gregory Craig, said to the
senators that the president couldn't be held perjurious in having sworn
under oath that this is what he and Monica actually did for the simple
reason that though she said something else, it boiled down to her having
said one thing about what they did together, he something else; so it's
just a he-said she-said quandary.

Eric Sterling is talking about what he persuasively denounces as a national
scandal, which is the workaday perjury of witnesses in dope-crime
prosecutions who are moved to lie by simple concentration on what the
prosecutor can do to you if you don't give him what he wants. Here, he
tells us, is what goes through the mind of the co-defendant when asked by
the prosecutor to denounce his fellow defendant:

"Geez, I'm facing 30 years or 50 years in prison. How can I get out? What
do I have to do? What do I have to testify to? Who do I have to testify
against? I have to say (that the other guy) was a dope dealer? How bad
(he'll ask me) do you think this guy is? (I'll say), 'He's real bad."
(He'll) say to me, 'He sold 50 kilos, he was the biggest dealer in town. Is
it true?' (I'll say) 'I swear it's true, honest."

It was implied by the president's defense that Monica Lewinsky is suspect
as a witness. After all, she was given immunity by the independent counsel,
was she not? Did she proceed to do the kind of thing Eric Sterling is
talking about, done every day in drug prosecutions?

There is an irony here because Sterling was counsel to the House Committee
on the Judiciary for 10 years, the Reagan years, and participated in the
crafting of the mandatory sentencing law, which law he now classifies as
"the greatest tragedy of my professional life."

What brought them on was the death from an overdose of drugs of the Boston
Celtics' Len Bias in 1986. The death of the basketball hero brought on "an
incredible conjunction between politics and hysteria." Tip O'Neill, who was
speaker of the House and congressional representative from Cambridge,
called the leadership together and said, "I want a drug bill; I want it in
four weeks." What then happened, with the participation of Sterling, was
what he described as a "stampede." "No hearings, no consideration by the
federal judges, no input from the Bureau of Prisons. Even the DEA (Drug
Enforcement Agency) didn't testify. The whole thing is kind of cobbled
together with chewing gum and bailing wire."

Eric Sterling is very eloquent with his complaint. He reminds us that at
the time the mandatory sentencing law was written, there were 30,000
federal prisoners. The figure is now 100,000. He wishes us to believe that
many of these are there because the law makes a 10-year mountain out of a
2-ouce marijuana molehill. He is certainly persuasive in pleading the
extraordinary severity of current sentencing. The day before Mr. Craig
pleaded Clinton's case, the Supreme Court upheld a 25-years-to-life
sentence against a convicted Californian who had stolen a $20 bottle of
vitamins. He was now a victim of the three-times-and-you're-out law,
theoretically appealing, but sometimes grotesque in its application.

What those who protest the severity of mandatory sentencing for drugs need
to do is to confront the enticing correlation between the great reduction
in crime in the past few years and the longevity of prison sentences. Those
of us who are on record as rejecting the war on drugs have contended that
the reason for most drug crime is the profitability of merchandising drugs,
which would not be the case if drugs were available to addicts at the cost
of manufacture (2 percent of street price). If it is true that perjury is
wholesale because of self-defense against egregious prison sentences, that
is something Congress should get around to investigating, after it is done
with Clinton.