When you give testimony like Gonzo did aren't you supposed to tell the truth the first time?

Question

Do common people get chance after chance to change their testimony around to avoid prosecution?

What judge gives the common people the chance to change the wording around and tells you... you need to change the wording?

Answer 1

In government and private business, there is a process of delegating authority. You cannot expect a person who is in command of hundreds of thousands of people in his department of government to know all the details of what they all do, just as you cannot expect the boss of a company of thousands of people to know all the details of all the stuff they do.

Now let's suppose you have meetings every week for several years & someone asks you what happened at a meeting 2 years ago. Are you going to have such a perfect memory that you know everything that happened? This is why meetings have minutes, where someone writes up what happened, circulates them to everyone who was there, and gives them an opportunity to make corrections.

Further, the nature of some jobs is that there is a lot of stuff happening, a lot of complexity, so there is a need to keep good records other than minutes of meetings, for other kinds of things happening, and work being done.

In common every day life, someone asks me something, and I either know because it happened in the last day or so, or I have to look it up in the computer. But if we are in a court room, and we are being asked about something that happened months ago, and we do not have our records in front of us, we do not have access to our computer to look it up, we have to qualify most everything with

"To the best of my memory." or "I think ..."

or plain "I do not remember the details."

then someone asks a question of clarification so
"Oh yes, now you remind me, you jogged my memory, I remember a few more details."

Now I think a guy who is in charge of a government department or whatever, ought to have like a secretary to help organize his records, be there at the Q+A to access the answers & show him in real time ... here are the details of what happened.

A common ordeinary person does not have access to that kind of help, so a high government official ought to be able to geive better quality answers than an ordinary person.

Answer 2

If I remember correctly, Bill Clinton got in BIG trouble for lying while under oath about a bj. I don't think it's too much to ask politicians to be honest, regardless of what party they are in.

Answer 3

Judges don't -- Congress usually does.

The Congressional practice of allowing witnesses to amend their verbal statements is a long standing tradition -- not unique to Gonzales or this particular hearing.