Court Opinion

ID: 9674166
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 04:24:13.287597+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:25.921686
License: Public Domain

ON STATE’S MOTION FOR REHEARING
MORRISON, Presiding Judge.
The state has favored us with a scholarly brief in which they cite a number of authorities from other jurisdictions, as requested by the writer when the state argued its motion for rehearing.
In the main, these cases rely upon a statement found in 2 C.J.S. 971 as follows:
“The jurat is prima facie evidence of matters stated therein. Extrinsic evidence, however, is of course admissible to prove that such statements are in fact false.”
The difficulty which this court has encountered from the original submission of this case lies in the phraseology of our Texas perjury statutes (Articles 302 and 304, V.A.P.C.), to which attention was directed in our original opinion.
The force and effect of such statutes is to require that the state prove in all prosecutions for perjury in this state that the false statement was made under the sanction of an oath which had been legally administered.
It must be borne in mind that there is an entire absence of any showing in the record before us that the appellant ever appeared before Lusby at the time he signed the instrument in question.
We quote from Sullivan v. First National Bank of Flatonia, 83 S.W. 421, as follows:
“We think, therefore, the law requires the affiant to be in the *183personal presence of the officer administering the oath; not to the end that the officer may know him to be the person he represents himself to be, for it is not required that the affiant be identified, or introduced, or be personally known to the officer, but to the end that he be certainly identified as the person who actually took the oath. Oaths and affirmations according to the statute authorizing and governing them are taken before the officer authorized to administer them.”
This case cites O’Reilly v. People, 86 N.Y. 154, from which we quote as follows:
“To make a valid oath for the falsity of which perjury will lie, there must be in some form, in the presence of an officer authorized to administer it, an unequivocal and present act, by which the affiant consciously takes upon himself the obligation of an oath. The delivery in this case of the signed affidavit to the officer was not such an act, and was not made so by the intention of the one party or the supposition of the other.”
Though a great latitude has been allowed in proving the execution of an oath, we find that the authorities from this and other states, which we consider to be based on sounder reasoning, require the presence of the affiant before the person administering the oath.
The state’s motion for rehearing is overruled.