SPECIAL REPORT * As the public debates allegations of lying in the Clinton-Lewinsky case and by O.J. Simpson in his trials, experts fear . . . : Time-Honored Oath to ‘Whole Truth’ May Be Losing Aura

As the nation takes sides over whether President Clinton should be impeached if he lied under oath about cheating on his wife, there is increasing debate on a less public scale in Los Angeles about whether O.J. Simpson should be charged with perjury.

In his 1996-97 civil trial, Simpson denied under oath that he had ever struck his murdered ex-wife despite the fact that he is a convicted spouse abuser.

The two cases, combined with the paucity of perjury prosecutions nationwide and the public yawn over Clinton’s alleged lies and possible obstruction of justice, are raising serious questions among legal experts about whether the time-honored pillar of the entire judicial system--the oath “to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth”--is losing its aura.

For more than a year, Denise Brown, sister of Simpson’s slain ex-wife, and Los Angeles lawyer Gloria Allred have been pushing Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti to launch a perjury investigation against the former football star.

Tired of waiting for Garcetti, Brown sent a letter to the Los Angeles County Grand Jury on July 10 asking it to investigate the matter or to bypass Garcetti’s office and seek an investigation by the attorney general of California. Brown said last week that the grand jury had told her it would consider her request.

Garcetti declined to comment.

His office rarely prosecutes people for lying in court proceedings, said Sandi Gibbons, Garcetti’s spokeswoman.

His record is not unusual. Nationally, less than 1% of the criminal cases filed are for perjury because such cases are difficult to prove, time consuming and sometimes filled with political repercussions, as is the Simpson case.

The Clinton case is one of the rarities. But recent polls show that the overwhelming majority of the public does not care whether Clinton committed perjury, because he merely did what many people would do--lie about a private matter. Indeed, the public is critical of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr for pushing the perjury investigation.

But because such attitudes can open up a huge debate over where to draw the line between perjury that is permissible and that which is not, many legal experts are worried that the oath is in trouble.

“There is this sense the oath just isn’t what it used to be,” said Kenneth A. Rohr, dean of the National Judicial College in Reno.

Officially, Garcetti is equally concerned about perjury, and he takes a strong stance against it.

“To permit perjury to occur without attempting to take any action thereon makes it appear that the criminal justice system condones liars, and that lying is a normal part of the system,” he said in his office’s Legal Policies Manual.

But in practice, his commitment to that policy falters, especially when it forces politically embarrassing reminders of his office’s defeat in the “criminal trial of the century,” critics say.

Losing the double-murder case against Simpson was considered a major defeat for Garcetti, a defeat that many believe almost cost him the 1996 election and contributed to a growing belief by some that he can’t win the big ones.

With several of his deputies jockeying for position to run against him in 2000, another Simpson investigation and trial would probably carry over to the start of the campaign season.

“If it’s the political facts . . . that he is considering [on the perjury question], that should not be,” Allred said.

During Simpson’s civil trial, the Heisman trophy winner was found liable for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman. The heart of the Brown and Goldman families’ case was that the slayings were the final outcome of a pattern of spousal abuse against Nicole going back to the beginning of their relationship, with Goldman getting caught in the crime by happenstance.

During the earlier criminal trial, Garcetti’s prosecutors had compiled a long list of incidents in which Nicole or other witnesses told about seeing Simpson beat her.

Garcetti’s team didn’t use most of those incidents in the criminal trial, but the Browns and Goldmans did in the civil case, including the New Year’s Day fight in 1989 at their Brentwood mansion.

In that incident, Nicole suffered a split lip, a red welt over one eye, scratches and bruises. A police report said Simpson left a hand print on her neck. Later, Simpson admitted in a letter referring to the incident that he was to blame.

“Let me start by expressing to you how wrong I was for hurting you,” Simpson wrote. “There’s no acceptable excuse for what I did.”

Police charged him with spousal abuse. Prosecutors with the city attorney’s office thought the beating was so severe that they recommended a month in jail and an intensive yearlong treatment program for men who batter their wives.

Simpson pleaded no contest to the charge, and the judge found him guilty of spousal abuse. But he rejected the prosecutors’ recommendations for jail time. The judge made Simpson perform some community service and pay $970 in fines, penalties and contributions to a shelter for battered women. He ordered counseling, but let Simpson pick his own counselor and let him receive the counseling via phone.

Prosecutors with the city attorney’s office were outraged. Garcetti even weighed in with an opinion, saying the sentence was “inappropriate and ineffective.”

Eight years later during the civil trial, Simpson was asked about the 1989 incident and the others. In each case, he emphatically denied ever hitting Nicole.

Stan Goldman, a professor at Loyola Law School, said the relevancy of Simpson’s denial to the outcome of the trial is what makes a perjury investigation more justified than in the Clinton-Paula Jones sexual harassment suit.

To prove perjury, prosecutors must show that the lie was intentional and that it was relevant to the issue of the trial.

In contrast to the Simpson case, Clinton has been accused of lying during a deposition about something--his relationship with Monica Lewinsky--that did not have a significant bearing on whether he sexually harassed Paula Jones, Goldman said. For that reason, his statements were ruled inadmissible.

Allred said that if Starr can launch a perjury investigation against Clinton for lying about something that had no bearing on the civil suit filed against him, surely the Los Angeles County district attorney can justify a probe against Simpson.

The fact that the Brown and Goldman families won the civil trial despite the alleged perjury is no excuse for not prosecuting, she said.

“If perjury was committed, it’s a crime against the people of California, and they were not a party to the civil suit,” Allred said.

Efforts to reach Simpson through his lawyer Robert C. Baker were unsuccessful. Baker declined to discuss the matter.

But other defenders of Simpson say the court system dealt with the domestic abuse issue at least twice since 1989--in the murder trial in 1995, when he was found not guilty, and in the civil trial, where the jury listened to his denials and then ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages to the Brown and Goldman families.

Gerald Uelman, law professor at Santa Clara University and a member of the Simpson defense team in the first trial, said targeting Simpson for perjury would be unfair.

He questions whether people advocate prosecution of Simpson--not because they are concerned about whether he lied in court--but because they think he should be in jail for killing his ex-wife.

“That would be the worst kind of selective prosecution,” he said.

“The issue [whether Simpson abused his wife] was thoroughly investigated and presented in both cases, and he was thoroughly cross-examined in the civil trial. The juries heard the evidence and they came to conclusions. So it’s not that we need another trial to litigate that issue,” Uelman said.

He thinks the most effective check on lying is vigorous use of the adversarial system of trial. The best way to ferret out lies is liberal use of “discovery” to learn as much about the opposition’s case prior to trial and vigorous cross-examinations of each other’s witnesses.

People lie on the witness stand because they think no one will catch them, not because they fear prosecution for perjury, he said.

Other legal experts say the significance of the issue transcends Simpson or Clinton.

Robert Philobosian, a former Los Angeles County district attorney, said, “It goes to the heart of the judicial process if a person is allowed to lie as a party to a case.”

Rohr, the judicial college dean, believes that the failure to prosecute perjury, especially in high profile cases like Simpson’s, could have an important impact on the credibility of laws against lying under oath.

“I know we run into cost-benefit analysis of using prosecutorial resource, that perjury cases are difficult to win and they take a lot of time,” Rohr said. “But if you don’t prosecute the very obvious perjury, you are sending the message that it doesn’t matter.”