Joel Jacobsen

Without knowing anything at all about the particular case, could you guess the profession of a witness?  Here's the witness's description of the testimony he gave several years earlier in a corruption trial involving Italy's media mogul/Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi:

I kept in close touch with the B people...they also knew quite how much the way in which I had been able to give my evidence (I told no lies, but I turned some very tricky corners, to put it mildly) had kept Mr B out of a great deal of trouble...I was told I would receive money...$600,000 would be put in a hedge fund...For obvious reasons...it needed to be done discreetly.

He wrote this in a letter to his accountant after the tax authorities had begun questioning his failure to pay tax on the $600,000.  (Here's the full text of the letter, supposedly.)   He claimed at first that the money was merely a gift given from the goodness of the Prime Minister's heart, like the du Pont heiress's spontaneously-generous gift of $2.3 million to the Delaware county executive (see post 64), although he later claimed the money was instead from a different client altogether.  (You can understand how easy it is to lose track of the origin of the $600,000 in your Swiss bank account.)

The letter to the accountant must certainly have been part of a consciously-created paper trail.  The writer thought he was helping his cause when he he wrote "I told no lies, but I turned some very tricky corners, to put it mildly".  His point was that he didn't take a bribe for providing false testimony, because while his testimony wasn't true, it was not-false.  And that, the writer took as a self-evident truth, meant there was nothing wrong with it.

Of course the writer, David Mills, was a lawyer.  No other profession views the not-false as an acceptable substitute for truth.  (See post 65.)  The American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct state that a lawyer has a "duty of candor" to the court, but then define that duty in strictly negative terms, as the duty not to say anything provably false.  Truth, like innocence (as opposed to not-guilty), is simply not a category recognized by the law.

Mr. Mills' affairs have become big news in Britain because his wife happens to be a member of Tony Blair's cabinet, secretary for one of those peripheral ministries that European governments reserve for female politicians.  The news today is that the couple has separated in advance of new revelations expected in Sunday's papers.  It was a choice between marriage and career, I suppose.   And, to paraphrase Caspar Gutman, if you lose a husband, you can always get another, but there's only one slippery pole for a politician to climb. 

Here's some comments from the British blogosphere, and a sympathetic profile of Mills here.