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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

Being wrong is not the same as lying. Honest, but incorrect, testimony is not perjury.

This is something I fundamentally don't understand; it seems that American jurisprudence optimizes for "ignorance" and "deniability", rather than prudence and responsibility.

Seems the rich and powerful get given carte blanche to lie and ignore any predictable consequences of their decisions. There is no duty to know what is going on, worse, there is a presumption that it is better to not even know.

I don't understand how it could be considered just for someone to be punished for making an honest mistake in their testimony.

> Seems the rich and powerful get given carte blanche to lie and ignore any predictable consequences of their decisions.

They aren't[1]. This doesn't seem to be a case of someone rich and powerful getting away with lying.

[1] They may have the means to fight things in court to reduce their penalty for perjury, but that's not "carte blanche". Rich and powerful people do, in fact, get penalized for lying under oath. Just not 100% of the time.

>I don't understand how it could be considered just for someone to be punished for making an honest mistake in their testimony.

His job is to run the company and take responsibility for it. If he doesn't know something illegal is going on, he is still at fault for not learning about it

This flirts with the is/ought fallacy. The way you wrote, it sounds like you’re saying that in our current legal system they can be found “found at fault” in a legal sense.

But I believe what you meant is that under a different/hypothetical legal system, one which you believe to be closer to optimal, they should be found at fault.

If the person one party has called as an expert doesn't know what they are talking about, that's a wonderful opportunity for the other side to discredit them. If your expert doesn't know what they are talking about, you should not use their testimony (see above). If nobody in the world knows whether a witness or expert knows what they are talking about or not, that's functionally equivalent to them being right, and there is nothing anybody can do about it.

I do not think you're incorrect, but wouldn't this incentivize confidently guessing (making stuff up) if it's less favorable to publicly admit you don't know something? Since you can use the executive excuse of simply being misinformed. Edit: meanwhile, this was discussed in a sibling comment.

Yes, it does incentivize this. But it disincentivizes something even worse (attaching penalties to honest testimony). There is no perfect answer here. All we can do is choose what sort of adverse outcome to want to minimize. US law tends to lean toward it being better to fail to penalize wrongdoing than to penalize innocent people.

That said, if someone is giving testimony that is intentionally deceptive such as lying and saying it was a mistake, making stuff up -- which is lying -- or even being deceptive without uttering an untruth, that is something that can be penalized.

The pros engage in perjury by just saying "I don't remember". It may be a lie, but good luck proving that.

I would argue, from a layman's perspective, that "I do not know" and "I do not remember" have significant differences, and drawing those parallels would only serve to muddy the waters. In this case it could be possible to show that the testimony was given - even if without other deceit or malice - without competence and "any reasonable person" would be aware of their lack of expertise. Just like it could be possible to show, through evidence such as correspondence, that X had knowledge of Y. I wonder if the system is resilient against such speculated abuse.

Edit: these logical inversions made my ESL head spin a bit. The point was that "I do (not) know" is more readily falsifiable than "I do (not) remember".

In a trial for perjury, the person would be asked, under oath, how they came to believe the information they claim they believed when they gave the testimony that is under dispute. If they actually just made it up or guessed, they would either have to say so, or commit perjury by lying about it. And if the lie was, for example, that so and so gave them a briefing and they understood them to be saying X, then so and so would be called as a witness and their testimony about whether such a briefing took place, and what was said if it did, would be given in evidence.

> wouldn't this incentivize confidently guessing (making stuff up)

Making stuff up is not the same as honestly making statements that you believe are correct, but which are actually wrong. In the latter case, the person (Pichai in this case) could give reasons why he held that belief (for example, so and so gave him a briefing on the feature and he understood them to be telling him X). In the former case (guessing), he wouldn't; he would have to admit under oath that he just made the stuff up. I don't know if that technically counts as perjury, but it certainly doesn't seem to be consistent with giving testimony under oath.

> I don't know if that technically counts as perjury

I believe that it does. Making stuff up is lying.

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