BY ROBERTO SURO and BILL MILLER
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- Last year, federal prosecutors launched nearly 50,000 criminal cases. Eighty-seven of them were perjury cases.
Lying, and what the law should do about it, are among the core issues in the case against President Clinton. Perjury allegations are central to five of the 11 grounds for impeachment in independent counsel Kenneth Starr's report to Congress.
In the eyes of the law, lying is anything but simple.
Lying to a D.C. police officer, for example, is not a crime. Lying to an FBI agent is. (Lying to the officer could lead to various charges, including obstruction of justice.)
The crime of perjury is more complicated than making a statement that is not true. "Perjury is really hard to prove," said Jim Cole, a veteran Washington public integrity lawyer now in private practice. "When you try a perjury case, you are splitting legal hairs. They are very technical cases. It comes down to what the person said, what they understood themselves to be saying, and what they understood the question to be."
A good chunk of the legal arguments between Mr. Starr and the White House is about when a spotty memory turns into perjury. Both sides cite dozens of cases to support their contentions -- an argument that could stretch back to the British Perjury Statute of 1563, when perjury was defined as a deliberate lie.
In practice, prosecutors go after only certain kinds of liars -- chiefly public officials and bad police officers.
"As prosecutors, we encounter people who lie under oath all the time," acknowledged S. Randolph Sengel, the commonwealth's attorney in Alexandria, Va. "I don't mean to sound cynical, but a day doesn't go by when somebody doesn't come to court and bend it a little. If you were determined to prosecute every falsehood people made in court, that is all you would be doing."
Prosecutors do go after other, lesser fibs. Lies told in hopes of snaring extra Social Security benefits generated four times as many criminal cases as perjury last year. And there were nearly 10 times as many prosecutions for income tax fraud as for perjury.
