Court Opinion

ID: 4943724
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2021-09-24 11:51:36.387267+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:15:00.237426
License: Public Domain

HOOD, Chief Judge
(concurring):
I fully concur but add the following. It is my opinion that when a trial judge, as he must, instructs the jurors that they are the sole judges of the credibility of the witnesses and the weight to be given their testimony, there is no occasion to give the falsus in uno instruction. I am in full accord with the late Judge Parker who, speaking for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginian Railway Co. v. Armentrout, 166 F.2d 400, 405-406 (1948), 4 A.L.R.2d 1064, said:
There was no occasion to apply to such testimony the harsh falsus in uno falsus in omnibus rule, which has little or no place in modern jurisprudence. That rule arose when conviction of felony *448disqualified a witness; and it was based on the reasoning that, since perjury was a felony, the jurors should disregard the testimony of one whom they found to have perjured himself in the trial before them. The rule has been watered down until it means no more now than that the jury may disbelieve a witness if they think he is lying; but they need no instruction as to that and giving it with respect to a particular witness accomplishes nothing except to convey to the jury the impression that the judge thinks that the witness has lied. As was well said by Prof. Wigmore in his great work on evidence, 2d Ed., vol. 2 p. 449: “It may be said, once for all, that the maxim is in itself worthless, first, in point of validity, because in one form it merely contains in loose fashion a kernel of truth which no one needs to be told, and in the others it is absolutely false as a maxim of life; and secondly, in point of utility, because it merely tells the jury what they may do in any event, not what they must do or must not do, and therefore it is a superfluous form of words. It is also in practice pernicious, first, because there is frequently a misunderstanding of its proper force, and secondly, because it has become in the hands of many counsel a mere instrument for obtaining new trials upon points wholly unimportant in themselves.”