Perjury

Perjury is the offense of knowingly making a false statement about a material fact while under oath or affirmation in a legal proceeding, such as courtroom testimony, a deposition, or a sworn written declaration, an offense against the administration of justice itself rather than against any individual victim. The offense generally requires that the false statement be made willfully, that the speaker knew it was false at the time, and that it concern a matter material to the proceeding, so an honest mistake, a statement made under a genuine and reasonable misunderstanding, or an immaterial falsehood typically does not meet the legal threshold for perjury even though it was, in fact, untrue. Because perjury strikes at the reliability of sworn testimony that courts and investigations depend on to establish facts, most legal systems treat it as a serious offense in its own right, and related offenses, such as subornation of perjury, procuring another person to commit perjury, and making a false statement to investigators outside a formal proceeding, are frequently codified alongside it as part of the same family of offenses against the justice system. Perjury prosecutions are comparatively rare relative to the volume of sworn testimony given in any legal system, a pattern criminologists and legal scholars attribute to the practical difficulty of proving a witness's knowledge and intent beyond a reasonable doubt, rather than to any assumption that false testimony itself is rare.