Subornation of perjury
permitting someone purposefully lie in court
In American law, Scots law, and under the laws of some English-speaking Commonwealth nations, subornation of perjury is the crime of persuading or permitting a person to commit perjury, which is the swearing of a false oath to tell the truth in a legal proceeding, whether spoken or written.
U.S. Law
In American federal law, Title 18 U.S.C. § 1622 provides:
Whoever procures another to commit any perjury is guilty of subornation of perjury, and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
The term subornation of perjury further describes the circumstance wherein an attorney at law causes a client to lie under oath or, allows another party to lie under oath.
In California law, per the state bar code, the subornation of perjury constitutes an act of "moral turpitude" on the part of the attorney, and thus, is cause for their disbarment, or for the suspension of their license to practice law.
In legal practice
As a crime, it has been defined as "persuading another to commit perjury."
But "suborn" is more broadly defined. Amongst three definitions: to induce a person to commit a wrongful act ... esp. in a secret or underhanded manner; to induce a person to commit perjury; and to obtain perjured testimony from another.
In legal practice, the condition of suborning perjury applies to an attorney who presents either testimony or an affidavit, or both, either to a judge or to a jury, which the attorney knows to be materially false, and not factual. In civil law and in criminal law, the attorney's knowledge that the testimony is materially false must rise above mere suspicion to what an attorney would reasonably have believed in the circumstances of the matter discussed in the testimony.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Subornation of perjury” is permitting someone purposefully lie in court. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Subornation, perjury and permitting, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1543277. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1622.
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This entry incorporates text from “Subornation of perjury” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.