Perjury: laws, charges, and the statute of limitations.

The three statutes.

Section 1621 is the classic: a false, material statement under oath, anywhere an oath is authorized - court, deposition, signed declaration. Section 1623 covers false declarations before a court or grand jury specifically, with a lower proof bar for the government (no two-witness rule) and one gift: a recantation defense. Section 1622, subornation, reaches whoever induces the lie. Each carries up to five years per count.

What the government must prove.

Four things: an oath, a false statement, knowledge of falsity, and materiality - the capacity to influence the tribunal. Each element is a defense lane. Literal truth defeats falsity even when the answer misled (Bronston v. United States). Ambiguous questions defeat knowledge - you cannot knowingly lie answering a question that reasonably meant something else. And trivia defeats materiality: not every wrong answer matters to the case.

Under § 1623(d), a witness who recants in the same proceeding - before the lie substantially affects it, and before exposure is imminent - cannot be prosecuted for the original declaration. The window is narrow and closes fast; it is a counsel decision, made same-week, not a hope.

The statute of limitations.

Five years from the false statement - the general federal clock of 18 U.S.C. § 3282. The clock runs from the testimony itself, not from discovery: a lie found in year six is ordinarily beyond reach. But adjacent charges can revive the conduct - obstruction schemes, false statements to agents made later, or conspiracy counts where the lie was an overt act inside a longer plot.

If you are charged - or about to be.

Perjury indictments usually arrive with the transcript already highlighted. The defense is forensic: reconstruct the question, the context, the documents that show what you knew, and the ambiguity the government is reading out of the record. This firm has tried credibility cases in the country’s hardest courtrooms - the record shows it - and perjury cases are credibility cases, start to finish.

THE AUTHOR

Todd A. Spodek

Managing partner. Second-generation federal defense lawyer - the Netflix defense, the Fox and CNN analyst chair, and two decades of federal courtrooms.

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