Abstract
The way in which defense lawyers phrase their challenges in criminal proceedings where police witnesses are thought to have committed perjury might place decisionmakers in the awkward position of unintentionally or intentionally coming to the aid of the witnesses who are unable to defend themselves during closing arguments. This article proposes a shift in the paradigm of how defense counsel characterize and handle testimony that seems untruthful, without having to engage in tactics that intend to be disrespectful to all police officers, let alone to the witnesses in the trial. Creating a continuum from absolute truthfulness to absolute untruthfulness and asking the fact finder to weigh the testimony on that continuum in order to determine which parts of the testimony might have been not credible and which parts were credible would remove the fact-finder from defending the law enforcement officer’s testimony or from being asked to reject all of the testimony without regard for any truthful statements.
Recommended Citation
David R. Katner,
Responding to Police Perjury,
73 Clev. St. L. Rev.
963
(2025)
available at https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clevstlrev/vol73/iss4/7
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