Perjury Law Unchanged

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30553, 23 September 1964, Page 17

Perjury Law Unchanged

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright)

LONDON, Sept 22. A British criminal law revision committee today decided “reluctantly but unanimously” against recommending new legislation on the law of perjury. In December the British Home Secretary (Mr Henry Brooke) invited the committee, set up in 1959, to conI sider legal points arising from the prosecutions of Stephen Ward. Christine Keeler and the Jamaican jazz singer, Aloysius “Lucky” Gordon.

Miss Keeler, a 22-year-old model, was sentenced to nine months’ gaol for perjury in Gordon’s trial after a threeyear sentence for allegedly assaulting her had been quashed by a court of criminal appeal. In its report today the law committee suggested the perjury law could be strengthened, and recommended a draft bill which would give High Court judges power, in certain circumstances. to order the arrest of a witness who was likely to disobey an order to attend court. “We recognise the objection to a state of the law where undoubted perjury may have to go unpunished I

because of difficulty of proof,” the committee said. “But we regard it as a fatal objection to any Of the possible provisions which we have been able to think of that it might have the result of making it more difficult to arrive at the truth at a trial. “The paramount purpose of the law should be to obtain true evidence at the trial. If it is a choice between having true evidence at the trial and having the satisfaction of prosecuting a perjurer afterwards it is better to have the truth and forego the satisfaction.” The 16-member committee had Britain’s Lord Justice of Appeal, Lord Justice Sellers, as its chairman.