Raise your hand

[KitaYama]

Two questions :
1-
In court, witnesses are required to raise their hand and swear, traditionally on a Bible, that they will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
I question whether this practice has any meaningful effect on the accuracy of testimony.
A witness who intends to lie will not suddenly become truthful because an oath was administered, while a witness who intends to tell the truth has no need for one.

Moreover, the legal consequences for lying under oath, since perjury applies only in that context. This creates an odd implication: that false statements made outside an oath are treated as less serious, or even implicitly acceptable, despite still occurring within a judicial process. (During interrogations, ....)
If the court’s goal is to establish the truth, why does that obligation seem to depend on a ceremonial moment rather than applying uniformly to all testimony? What concrete problem does the oath actually solve?

2-
I do NOT understand concurrent sentencing. Why bother giving a 2nd sentence if it's going to be concurrent?
To me it means : We sentence you, but you don't need to care about it. Because it won't happen.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

1. Raising the hand for the perjury oath is a formality, a part of the oath-taking process. The penalty for perjury (specifically, lying under oath in court) is the reason for having given an oath at all. Without the oath, you correctly point out that there can be no penalty for that particular action. To the extent that a lie can be discovered, the oath "enables" the imposition of a penalty. The penalty, not the oath, is why you believe testimony under oath better than statements not made under oath.

False statements outside of an oath can be simple story-telling. For instance, me at a poker game - for which the only oaths are probably blasphemous.

2. Sometimes we don't understand concurrent sentencing either. However, judges are allowed to make sentences concurrent or consecutive as they wish, and we DO have a standard that says that the punishment must fit the crime. If someone has 30 counts of selling something illegally that is worth at most a 1-5 year sentence, no physical harm was done, and full or partial restitution occurs, a judge MIGHT choose concurrent sentences. It IS left to their discretion.

One thing that consecutive sentencing does is it delays the probability of parole, since most states have some rule about the percentage of your sentence you must serve to be eligible. If you get five sentences of 50 years to life consecutively, the odds of you living long enough to reach the local limit, even if it is only 50%, are pretty low.

One of the problems regarding "consecutive" vs. "concurrent" is that some states have legislators who were elected on a "get tough on crime" promise and they use longer jail sentences rather than attack the problems that drive criminals to commit crimes. Judges, on the other hand, have the right to show mercy if they feel it is warranted, and the ability to run sentences concurrently is the way to counteract what we call a "hanging judge" (historically, a judge who imposes the harshest penalty available every time.)

 

[MarkK]

1-
I think requiring a witness to swear an oath as a ritual in a process is more about granting legitimacy to the process itself, not so much to force a witness to render accurate testimony, which as you observe, is impossible.
If you were to design a process that at its core is only based on trust anyway, what features would you design into it so that observers, and would-be mis-trusters, would be more likely--in their minds--to grant it legitimacy?

2-
Similarly, look at process legitimacy, not outcome effects & implementation.

I think the question of legitimacy of process is critical. What is lacking in despotism is that outcomes are implemented on the whim of the despot.
• Advantage? No red tape. Git 'er done.
• Disadvantage? Despotic whimsy lacks institutional and legal procedural legitimacy. If a despot rules by fiat on a whim, why shouldn't his generals conspire to replace him on a whim?