The Oath Is Theater. The Evidence Is Not.

By Joe Broadmeadow

I watched a man place his hand on a Bible, swear to tell the truth, sit down, and lie for forty minutes.

He did it calmly. He did it well. He did it under the eye of a judge, a jury, and whatever he believed waited for him on the other side of his own funeral.

That was not a rare morning in court.

In twenty years with the East Providence Police Department, commanding the Investigative Services Division, among other assignments, I lost count of the sworn statements later contradicted by a phone record, a surveillance log, or a recording.

Witnesses lied. Defendants lied. Informants lied with a fluency I came to admire in the way you admire a good pickpocket. On occasion, police officers lied, and those cases still bother me most.

Not one of them appeared troubled by the book.

The oath comes to us from English ecclesiastical courts, where the theory made a certain sense. If a witness believed a false word placed his soul in permanent jeopardy, the fear of eternity might outweigh the temptations of the afternoon.

The oath functioned as a supernatural polygraph, and the state, unable to see into a man’s head, outsourced the job to God.

Three things break that machinery.

The punishment arrives late. The reward arrives now. A witness facing ten years in the ACI weighs a consequence he can picture against a consequence he cannot, and the immediate always wins.

Prosecutors call this leverage. Investigators call it Tuesday.

The punishment is also negotiable. Most faiths built on divine judgment also offer forgiveness, repentance, confession, and absolution. A believer with a robust theology of mercy can lie at eleven and be right with his God by supper.

The oath assumes a religion of consequences and ignores the religions of second chances.

And the oath asks the wrong person for a guarantee. A witness who intends to deceive suffers no hesitation at the swearing, because a person willing to lie about a homicide will hardly balk at lying about his willingness to lie.

The ritual screens only the honest, who would tell the truth anyway. It catches no one else. An oath is a promise offered by the very person whose promises the court has reason to doubt.

If the oath worked, perjury would be a rarity worth prosecuting. Instead, we treat it as weather.

James B. Stewart, in his book on the subject, made the point bluntly: we track murder, rape, robbery, and burglary with precision, but nobody compiles meaningful national numbers on perjury and false statements, because there is too much of it and too little prosecution to produce a usable statistic.

Federal data tells the same story from another angle.

In one recent measured period, U.S. attorneys declined roughly 60% of the perjury, contempt, and intimidation cases referred to them, and such offenses accounted for a fraction of 1% of federal criminal cases filed.

Scholars have long noted the pattern. Perjury earned the nickname “the forgotten offense” precisely because it is widespread and almost never charged.

Lying under oath is not a hypothetical harm. The National Registry of Exonerations counted 97 exonerations in 2025, and perjury or false accusation accounted for 71 of them, 73 percent, the same share it recorded the year before.

One of those 97 came out of a Rhode Island courtroom. The registry has now logged 3,767 exonerations since 1989, and it calls its own count a basement figure, because it only knows about the cases it happens to find.

Read the misconduct breakdown, and the picture gets worse. Among the 2025 exonerations tainted by official misconduct, thirty involved perjury by an official actor, and in ten more, someone in authority knowingly let perjured testimony stand. Those witnesses swore the same oath as everyone else. Some of them carried badges.

People go to prison behind sworn lies. Some of them die there.

Here is the part people find surprising. The law does not require the Bible at all.

Article VI forbids any religious test for federal office. The presidential oath in Article II mentions no scripture and permits a plain affirmation instead of swearing an oath.

The Federal Rules of Evidence require a witness to promise truthfulness in a form calculated to press the duty on his conscience and say nothing whatsoever about a book, a hand, or a deity.

Quakers objected to swearing on religious grounds centuries ago, and the law made room for them without the sky falling.

Many courts have already quietly dropped the prop. Nobody noticed a spike in false testimony.

I am not arguing against reverence. The opposite, really. Treating scripture as a lie detector cheapens it, reducing a text people organize their lives around to a piece of courtroom hardware that does not function.

If the book means something, stop using it as a metal detector for souls.

Keep the oath if you like. Ritual has value, and a moment of ceremony before testimony reminds a courtroom of the seriousness of the enterprise. Just stop confusing the ceremony with a safeguard.

Truth in a courtroom comes from the same places it came from in every investigation I ever ran. Corroboration. Contemporaneous records. Video. Recorded calls. Documents created before anyone knew they mattered. Cross-examination by a lawyer who did the reading.

Consequences applied to liars often enough for the threat to mean something.

We would gain more truth from a prosecutor willing to charge perjury in a clear case than from a thousand more hands laid on a thousand more Bibles.

Faith belongs to the witness. Verification belongs to us.