PETER BACANOVIC

WAS PETER BACANOVIC WRONGLY CONVICTED ON TESTIMONY OF ONE WITNESS WHEN BOTH CASELAW AND THE U.S. ATTORNEY'S MANUAL REQUIRE MORE?

Throughout history the Courts have recognized that the two-witness rule must apply in any perjury prosecutions brought under Title 18 USC section 1621. Perjury prosecutions require a high degree of proof, and prosecutors can not bring charges for perjury under this law based solely on the testimony of a single witness. This statute incorporates the long established "two witness" rule.

According to the Supreme Court and even contained in the prosecutor's own rule book, the Department of Justice, United States Criminal Resource Manual, it states that the crux of the two-witness rule is that "the falsity of a statement alleged to be perjurious must be established either by the testimony of two independent witnesses, or by one witness and independent corroborating evidence which is inconsistent with the innocence of the accused."see: Department of Justice Manual, 1997.

The second witness must give testimony independent of the first which, if believed, would "prove that what the accused said under oath was false. "

Alternatively, the independent corroborating evidence must be inconsistent with the innocence of the accused and "of a quality to assure that a guilty verdict is solidly founded. " Department of Justice Manual, 1997 Supplement, at 9-69.265; United States v. Forrest, 639 F.2d 1224, 1226 (5th Cir. 1981).

It is therefore clear that a perjury conviction under section 1621 cannot lie where there is no independent second witness who corroborates the first, or where there is no independent evidence that convincingly contradicts the testimony of the accused.

In Weiler v. United States, 323 U.S. 606, 608-09 (1945), the United States Supreme Court observed that "[t]he special rule which bars conviction for perjury solely upon the evidence of a single witness is deeply rooted in past centuries. "

The common law courts as far back as seventeenth-century England required the testimony of two witnesses as a precondition to a perjury conviction, when the testimony of a single witness was in almost all other cases sufficient. The common law courts actually adopted the two-witness rule from the Court of Star Chamber, which had followed the practice of the ecclesiastical courts of requiring two witnesses in perjury cases.

The English rationale for the rule is as resonant today as it was in the seventeenth century: "[I]n all other criminal cases the accused could not testify, and thus one oath for the prosecution was in any case something as against nothing; but on a charge of perjury the accused's oath was always in effect evidence and thus, if but one witness was offered, there would be merely . . . an oath against an oath. "

Judge Cedarbaum allowed the jury to use testimony from a witness, Ann Armstrong, and then a phone log entry written by Ann Armstrong, as sufficient evidence to satisfy the requirement of the "two witness" rule in Peter's perjury charge. Doesn't her decision change the rules of evidence?

Was the phone log the required "independent corroborating evidence"?

Will Judge Cedarbaum go down in history as the woman who changed the "two-witness" rule to the "one witness" rule?

Did her decision lower the high burden of proof required by the government in perjury cases? Is it a violation of due process?

Isn't the spoken word of a person, and then a document written by the same person and containing the same words as their testimony, still only the testimony of one witness?

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