Trials & Litigation
Witness Who Questioned Meaning of Truth May Take Revised Oath
Posted Jan 21, 2009, 09:26 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
There are those who can’t handle the truth and those who can’t swear to it.
Expert witness Bruce Kokernot is apparently in the latter camp. He hesitated in December when a family court judge in New York asked Kokernot if he swore to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” the New York Law Journal reports.
“I swear to speak truthfully, Your Honor,” Kokernot answered. Pressed for a yes-or-no answer, Kokernot said science is a search for truth. "I do not hold that there is such a thing as the truth,” he said. But he did promise not to say anything that is “knowingly not truthful.”
That is good enough for Judge Timothy Lawliss of Clinton County. He wrote in a Jan. 12 opinion that Kokernot could testify as an expert if he affirmed his testimony would be, to the best of his knowledge, "accurate, correct and complete" and that he understood he could be subject to perjury for knowingly giving false testimony.
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