Jason Kessler goes on trial for perjury this week, barring a continuancre, so let's chat a bit about what happened and what perjury really is.
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In October, the Commonwealth's Attorney direct indicted him for perjury. http://www.newsplex.com/content/news/Kessler-arrested-and-released-after-perjury-indictment-449436803.html …
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So what is perjury? Popularly, people think perjury is lying under oath. But that's not entirely true. Perjury requires the untrue statement to be done wilfully and it must affect the outcome of the process in question.
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That's a high standard to meet. Wikipedia describes it well.pic.twitter.com/MQyEymT8Fy
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Suppose you got hit by a drunk driver that ran a redlight. It's probably not perjury if you say, "I was going home after picking up my dry cleaning" if it's found that you were actually picking up flowers and dry cleaning and you forgot about the flowers.
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It's also probably not perjury if you deliberately left out the flowers because they were for your mistress. What matters is that you were in the intersection, that you got hit, and that the driver was drunk. What you were picking up probably has no bearing on the outcome.
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Again, this is a fictitious scenario with no real life relevance to me or anyone I know, and is designed entirely to demonstrate the bar in the context of next week's trial.
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So that said, what the Commonwealth is alleging is that Jason: - knowingly made a false statement; - with intent to affect the outcome of a process; - and the statement materially affected the outcome of the process.
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This bar is high for a reason. The legal process depends on witnesses to testify freely; fear of felony charges for imperfect statements is detrimental to legal processes.
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So this case is interesting because of this high bar. The evidence must be clear to seek a direct indictment and proceed to trial. So will that be the case? We'll see, but here's what we know:
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The video evidence was clear enough to drop charges against the victim and to convict Jason of assault. This establishes that the statement was false. Jason pled guilty to assault, so it may have been knowingly false. And it definitely affected legal outcomes.
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The discrepancies in his statements are pretty large. He claimed someone hit him when he in fact hit someone else! So the Commonwealth's job will be to prove that this false statement was made with intent.
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End of conversation
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