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Tony Jefferson - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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panic and Perjury a psychosocial exploration of agency
British Journal of Social Psychology, 2005Co-Authors: Wendy Hollway, Tony JeffersonAbstract:The primary aim of this chapter is to explore the predicament of one man, Vince, in difficult circumstances, in order to produce a psychosocial analysis that could contribute to the understanding of agency. In the process we note the role of what we prefer to call affect, rather than emotion, in most contexts. If emotions are, as Blackman and Cromby (2007, p. 6) suggest, ‘those patterned brain/body responses that are culturally recognizable and provide some unity, stability and coherence to the felt dimensions of our relational encounters’, it is perhaps unsurprising that, because we are focusing on unconscious dynamics in this chapter, the term affect proves more relevant to our analysis than the emotions of anger and shame that are, arguably, the core suppressed emotions in the account. Vince himself never talked in terms of specific emotions, but rather, in line with Black- man and Cromby’s definition that ‘feelings register intensive experiences as subjective experience’ (ibid.), of how he was experiencing his painful world. In highlighting his embodied ‘sickness’, and the accompanying anxiety, we focus on the affective dimension. In this usage, anxiety is an affective state.
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Panic and Perjury: a psychosocial exploration of agency.
The British journal of social psychology, 2005Co-Authors: Wendy Hollway, Tony JeffersonAbstract:The aim of this article is to explore the predicament of one man in difficult circumstances, in order to produce a psychosocial analysis that could contribute to a social psychological understanding of agency. After a brief review of the problem of dualism in theorizing agency and relevant developments in theories of self, and a critique of assumptions about unitary rational subjects, we emphasize the effects of unconscious conflict on choice and agency. We also identify the importance of including people's biographically motivated investments in specific discursive positions. Vince, a middle-aged, working-class man from the north of England, the subject of our case study, had already been faced with difficult choices in order to hold on to a job that was bad for him. Now the choice appeared to be taken out of his hands by an illness without a discernible organic base and with no prospect of improvement that, for 5 months, had forced him to be on sick leave. Our approach in this paper, based on interpretation of material from two interviews, is to detail the multiple and contradictory meanings of Vince's job to him. In each of three areas - the daily experience of the job, the meaning of having a respectable job, and Vince's relationship with his boss - we illustrate the power of a psychosocial analysis to escape the limitations of both voluntaristic and deterministic accounts of individual action. In conclusion we define the agent of choice in Vince's case as the divided psychosocial subject of unconscious conflict; a subject located in social realities mediated not only by social discourses but by psychic defences.
Russell D. Covey - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Recantations and the Perjury Sword
Social Science Research Network, 2017Co-Authors: Russell D. CoveyAbstract:Courts are notoriously skeptical of recantation evidence, in part because of finality concerns, but also because they tend to treat such statements as less reliable than the original, in-court testimony that is being recanted. This essay argues that such skepticism is blind to what the essay refers to as the “Perjury sword” – credible threats by police and prosecutors to bring Perjury charges against witnesses who wish to recant prior statements. As illustrated in numerous cases, including many that resulted in formal exonerations, state use of the Perjury sword can all-too-easily induce false testimony and contribute to wrongful convictions. This essay argues for reforming our approach to recantation evidence. While acknowledging some of the challenges police and prosecutors face, particularly when dealing with crimes committed in high-crime areas and cases of domestic violence, the essay suggests a variety of strategies to mitigate the worst abuses of the Perjury sword. These strategies include reducing witness exposure to Perjury charges, expanding the recantation defense, and reconsidering how courts evaluate recantation testimony. While it is imperative that witnesses testify truthfully at trial, serious problems arise when Perjury sanctions are deployed to discourage honest recantations. Truth at trial is optimal, but truth delayed is better than no truth at all. The legal system must permit the responsible consideration of recantation evidence, even recognizing that doing so has a cost in terms of finality. The essay concludes by questioning the legal system’s strong attachment to monistic accounts of truth. Perhaps we would be better served if we embraced a more pluralistic conception of what constitutes truth in criminal justice, if not in the world more generally.
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Recantations and the Perjury Sword
Albany law review, 2015Co-Authors: Russell D. CoveyAbstract:Witness recantations pose a special problem in criminal law. Often, trial witnesses come forward, sometimes years after a criminal trial, and admit or allege that the incriminating testimony they gave at trial, and which contributed to the conviction of the defendant at that trial, was false or mistaken. (1) Convicted inmates submit such recantations as new evidence of actual innocence to courts in hopes of winning their release or at least a new trial. (2) Courts, however, are notoriously skeptical of recantation evidence, in part because of finality concerns, but also in part because judges tend to treat such statements as less reliable than the original, in-court testimony that was previously given. (3) But here, courts have it exactly backward, largely because they misunderstand or underappreciate the extent to which the prosecutorial Perjury sword places recanting witnesses in a legal dilemma. How many people, after all, are willing to admit publically that they erred or lied in the past and thereby risk a criminal Perjury conviction and possible prison sentence simply to benefit some other person, possibly a complete stranger? In those relatively rare instances in which a witness does willingly recant her trial testimony, such recantations should be granted a presumption of credibility rather than a presumption of falsity or simply dismissed, as they so often are. (4) What's more, there is little popular appreciation of the extent to which the prosecutorial Perjury sword--that is, the credible threat by police and prosecutors to bring Perjury charges against witnesses who wish to recant prior statements--can itself be used to induce false witness testimony. (5) Witness statements are not always purely voluntary. Many witnesses must be pressured or induced to give information to the police, and sometimes, the pressure used to extract helpful information crosses over into outright coercion. (6) Regardless of how an initial statement is obtained, however, once a witness has provided a statement under oath, the game is on. The threat of Perjury sanctions can be wielded to intimidate recalcitrant witnesses from diverging from the established script. (7) Thus, a single coerced, sworn statement can be used to ensnare a witness like a bear in a trap, leading inexorably from midnight backroom interrogation, to grand jury, to trial. (8) Later, after trial, some witnesses attempt to revoke their earlier testimony, but the Perjury sword continues to threaten even then. (9) There is no easy fix to the dilemma. It is imperative that witnesses testify truthfully at trial, and to the extent that penalties for lying at trial contribute to that goal, it is difficult to argue that they should be completely abandoned. On the other hand, Perjury sanctions cannot and should not be used to discourage honest recantations. Trial truth is optimal, but truth delayed is better than no truth at all. The legal system must permit the responsible consideration of recantation evidence, even recognizing that doing so has a cost in terms of finality. This short essay sets forth the argument for reforming our approach to recantation evidence. Part I discusses how police and prosecutors use the Perjury sword to lock in helpful testimony that in some cases is the product of coercion, to compel witnesses to give false testimony at subsequent proceedings, and to intimidate witnesses from changing or retracting their stories. Part II acknowledges some of the challenges police and prosecutors face, particularly when dealing with crimes committed in high-crime, urban contexts, and in domestic violence cases. The Perjury sword has proven to be a useful, and perhaps even essential, tool in those situations. Part III suggests some ways in which the use of the Perjury sword might be alleviated. These include reducing witness exposure to Perjury charges, expanding the recantation defense, and reconsidering how courts evaluate recantation testimony. …
Emily Corran - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Oxford Scholarship Online - Lying and Perjury in Confessors’ Manuals
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018Co-Authors: Emily CorranAbstract:Confessors’ manuals were the most important genre in which practical thought about lying and Perjury was developed during the thirteenth century. This chapter argues that confessors’ manuals shared an interest in moral dilemmas with Peter the Chanter’s Summa. A comparison of the treatment of a famous dilemma concerning a lie to save a life in Robert of Courson, Raymond of Penafort, and Hostiensis reveals the similarities in their approach. The key difference between confessors’ manuals and the practical theologians of the late twelfth century was the degree to which they quoted material from canon law. This chapter investigates this influx of legal material into pastoral writings and explains the reasons for the change. It suggests that engagement with canon law did not mean that the ethics of lying and Perjury became indistinguishable from canonical thought on the subject.
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Oxford Scholarship Online - The Early Casuistry of Lying and Perjury
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018Co-Authors: Emily CorranAbstract:Clerical casuistry of lying first appeared in the late twelfth century, although more general discussions of lying dated back to patristic times. Augustine had written influentially on the ethics of lying, but tended to insist on an unbending prohibition of lying rather than exceptional cases. In the twelfth century, new compilations of Christian theology, including Abelard’s Sic et Non and Gratian’s Decretum, suggested more explicitly that lying and Perjury was still an open question. Canon lawyers showed increased interest in casuistry, in the context of practical questions about mitigated guilt, and exegetes in the later twelfth century discussed the morality of biblical characters in the literal sense. All of these factors contributed to create a ferment of practical thought about lying and Perjury in this period. These were distinct currents in a larger tide of applied pastoral thought, which correlated with the rise of frequent confession among lay people.
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Oxford Scholarship Online - Lying and Perjury in Medieval Practical Thought
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018Co-Authors: Emily CorranAbstract:This is a study of medieval thought about dilemmas involving lying, justified concealment and broken promises. It argues that a distinctive way of thinking about the ethics of lying and Perjury, which reasoned through cases of conscience and practical situations, first appeared in an academic context in late twelfth century scholasticism, most notably in the Summa de Sacramentis et Animae Consiliis of Peter the Chanter. It was a tradition which continued in pastoral writings of the thirteenth century, the practical moral questions addressed by theologians in universities in the second half of the thirteenth century, and in the Summae de Casibus Conscientiae of the late Middle Ages. These various genres all participated in a casuistical thought about lying and deception which centred on deciding the best course of action in non-ideal situations and offered responses that acknowledged the need to adjust one’s actions to a unique set of circumstances. In the light of this discovery, the thesis investigates the origins of the casuistical concepts of equivocation and mental reservation. These teachings, which attracted satire in the Early Modern period, first appeared in late twelfth-century cases of conscience. It has been assumed that these ideas could only earn their keep by permitting Catholics to evade the morality of lying and Perjury: the medieval tradition paints a different picture. In this period, equivocation and mental reservation were part of an effort to explain how to follow the rules in ambiguous and perplexing cases. Instead of talking around the rules, these concepts were developed in order to make the rules work in exceptional situations. In Chapter 6 I show that assumptions made about early modern casuistical thought do not work for its medieval equivalent. A subsidiary argument will be that equivocation and mental reservation were not inherently academic ideas. I argue in chapter 1 that sustained thought about these questions was evinced in medieval vernacular literature quite independently from the scholastic tradition. Casuistical thought about lying and Perjury existed at a deeper level in the culture.
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lying and Perjury in medieval practical thought
Doctoral thesis UCL (University College London)., 2018Co-Authors: Emily CorranAbstract:This is a study of medieval thought about dilemmas involving lying, justified concealment and broken promises. It argues that a distinctive way of thinking about the ethics of lying and Perjury, which reasoned through cases of conscience and practical situations, first appeared in an academic context in late twelfth century scholasticism, most notably in the Summa de Sacramentis et Animae Consiliis of Peter the Chanter. It was a tradition which continued in pastoral writings of the thirteenth century, the practical moral questions addressed by theologians in universities in the second half of the thirteenth century, and in the Summae de Casibus Conscientiae of the late Middle Ages. These various genres all participated in a casuistical thought about lying and deception which centred on deciding the best course of action in non-ideal situations and offered responses that acknowledged the need to adjust one’s actions to a unique set of circumstances. In the light of this discovery, the thesis investigates the origins of the casuistical concepts of equivocation and mental reservation. These teachings, which attracted satire in the Early Modern period, first appeared in late twelfth-century cases of conscience. It has been assumed that these ideas could only earn their keep by permitting Catholics to evade the morality of lying and Perjury: the medieval tradition paints a different picture. In this period, equivocation and mental reservation were part of an effort to explain how to follow the rules in ambiguous and perplexing cases. Instead of talking around the rules, these concepts were developed in order to make the rules work in exceptional situations. In Chapter 6 I show that assumptions made about early modern casuistical thought do not work for its medieval equivalent. A subsidiary argument will be that equivocation and mental reservation were not inherently academic ideas. I argue in chapter 1 that sustained thought about these questions was evinced in medieval vernacular literature quite independently from the scholastic tradition. Casuistical thought about lying and Perjury existed at a deeper level in the culture.
Jeremy M. Miller - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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English [sic European] Model is an Avenue for Client-Perjury Reform
Social Science Research Network, 2006Co-Authors: Jeremy M. MillerAbstract:The problem of how to handle potential or actual client Perjury has brought debate among the Anglo-American legal systems for literally hundreds of years. What should the lawyer do if she is reasonably certain that her client intends to perjure himself? What should she do if the client, to her surprise, perjures himself? Finally, what should she do if she discovers, after the proceeding, that the client has perjured himself? As a practical matter most competent attorneys will avoid this problem entirely. The attorney can simply tell the client to get your story straight before we talk, because as a lawyer I am also an officer of the court, and cannot allow you to lie before the judge. But, the problem does surface - at least occasionally, and it poses an interesting query as to the proper role for attorneys and what is fair to expect from clients.
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client Perjury an ever present multidimensional problem
Social Science Research Network, 2006Co-Authors: Jeremy M. MillerAbstract:These permutations and combinations of conflicts between perennial legal values explain the good reasons why judges will disagree with one another. It was postulated in this author's prior work on this point, that good law strikes a balance between these perennial legal values. That is, a compromise between the extremes of following just and only the dictates of one legal value . . . or that of another, must be reached. So, for example, although the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure clause mandates suppression of illegally seized evidence, when there is objectively valid reasonable reliance ("good faith") on a warrant, statute, or the like, then the evidence should not be suppressed. Thus is dignity (the sanctity of the home, person, effects, etc.), the core value behind the Fourth Amendment, protected - but, not to the detriment of another core legal value, i.e., truth. A balance is reached.
Wendy Hollway - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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panic and Perjury a psychosocial exploration of agency
British Journal of Social Psychology, 2005Co-Authors: Wendy Hollway, Tony JeffersonAbstract:The primary aim of this chapter is to explore the predicament of one man, Vince, in difficult circumstances, in order to produce a psychosocial analysis that could contribute to the understanding of agency. In the process we note the role of what we prefer to call affect, rather than emotion, in most contexts. If emotions are, as Blackman and Cromby (2007, p. 6) suggest, ‘those patterned brain/body responses that are culturally recognizable and provide some unity, stability and coherence to the felt dimensions of our relational encounters’, it is perhaps unsurprising that, because we are focusing on unconscious dynamics in this chapter, the term affect proves more relevant to our analysis than the emotions of anger and shame that are, arguably, the core suppressed emotions in the account. Vince himself never talked in terms of specific emotions, but rather, in line with Black- man and Cromby’s definition that ‘feelings register intensive experiences as subjective experience’ (ibid.), of how he was experiencing his painful world. In highlighting his embodied ‘sickness’, and the accompanying anxiety, we focus on the affective dimension. In this usage, anxiety is an affective state.
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Panic and Perjury: a psychosocial exploration of agency.
The British journal of social psychology, 2005Co-Authors: Wendy Hollway, Tony JeffersonAbstract:The aim of this article is to explore the predicament of one man in difficult circumstances, in order to produce a psychosocial analysis that could contribute to a social psychological understanding of agency. After a brief review of the problem of dualism in theorizing agency and relevant developments in theories of self, and a critique of assumptions about unitary rational subjects, we emphasize the effects of unconscious conflict on choice and agency. We also identify the importance of including people's biographically motivated investments in specific discursive positions. Vince, a middle-aged, working-class man from the north of England, the subject of our case study, had already been faced with difficult choices in order to hold on to a job that was bad for him. Now the choice appeared to be taken out of his hands by an illness without a discernible organic base and with no prospect of improvement that, for 5 months, had forced him to be on sick leave. Our approach in this paper, based on interpretation of material from two interviews, is to detail the multiple and contradictory meanings of Vince's job to him. In each of three areas - the daily experience of the job, the meaning of having a respectable job, and Vince's relationship with his boss - we illustrate the power of a psychosocial analysis to escape the limitations of both voluntaristic and deterministic accounts of individual action. In conclusion we define the agent of choice in Vince's case as the divided psychosocial subject of unconscious conflict; a subject located in social realities mediated not only by social discourses but by psychic defences.