"What is truth?"

A California state seal adorns a wall of every California state courtroom that I can remember. It has a bear, it has a ship, it has a harbor, and it has grapes. It has Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. It has the word "Eureka". That means "I have found it."

But what if instead of "Eureka", it said "What is truth?"

You wouldn’t feel confident that justice will take place in that courtroom, would you? Finding truth is the first step to justice.

So I want to know, why are judges so bad at finding the truth, particularly when a police officer testifies?

Case in point. I had a motion to exclude evidence at trial, today, based on unlawful actions by a police officer. Now, the cross-examination went better than I could hope. When it was important for a particular gasoline spill to be large, the officer testified that it was large. When it was important for it to be small, he testified that it was smaller.

When a witness plainly changes his testimony to suit the momentary need of his side, and when that witness contradicts himself, it’s pretty clear that he’s drawing on a mental manure pile, not on his memory. And when he contradicts his own police report, and then gives implausible meanings to his own plain words in that report to try to explain away the contradiction, that, for me, erases all doubt.

But the judge found the officer believable. She accepted his testimony as true, and she ruled against my client.

The liars won today.

They do, more and more.

There is no outrage about lying in our times. There’s no penalty for lying, if you're a police officer or a lawyer. Judges accept the testimony of lying officers. This habit of judges is so widely known that criminal-defense attorneys have a rueful saying: "That’s a lie only a judge would believe."

Today, the judge looked past what was obvious. She didn’t use logic or common sense. She looked at the officer’s uniform and his badge, and at that point she knew which way the motion would go.

It takes so little to make people lie. Why did this officer lie? For the same reason that sportsmen cheat. He wanted to win. And while he was fouling on the "field", the "referee" was picking her nose. That’s crude, but I’m angry.

And judges don’t penalize lawyers who tell transparent lies. Sometimes they rule in their favor.

Sometimes I feel that the force and power of lies are an irresistible tsunami. Sometimes I feel that the force and power of my opposition is always a little behind the audacity of the next lie.

"What is truth?"

Pontius Pilate said that before he told those who were agitating for Jesus’s death that he found no fault with Jesus. He had Jesus flogged, but that didn’t satisfy the fury of Jesus’s enemies.  So Pilate gave over to torture and death the most loving man who ever lived, the man who was his king.

Jesus told Pilate that all who were on the side of truth listened to him. "What is truth?" was Pilate’s retort. Clearly you cannot be on the side of something that you cannot recognize.

We make choices: we are with Pilate, or we are on the side of truth. We humble ourselves before the truth, or, in our pride, we believe that our right to get what we want is more important than the truth.

My client is accused of receiving stolen property – a motorcycle. He had the motorcycle on his property. He had taken it from a woman, to fix it for her. She was going to pay him when she sold it. The officer asked him where he got the motorcycle from, and he told him. But when the officers called the woman up, she saw that the shit had hit the fan (crude, still angry) and she denied knowing my client, and she denied handing the motorcycle over to him. The officers assumed that she was telling the truth, and that my client was lying. They concluded therefore that he knew the motorcycle was stolen. The woman was probably in cahoots with her jailbird son, who likely stole the motorcyle to begin with.

After today’s hearing was over, I took my motorcycle helmet and walked to the courtroom door. A cop was sitting by the door. Seeing my helmet, he said, "You’d better keep your motorcycle away from your client!"

I replied, "My client is fucking innocent, and I have absolutely no sense of humor about that!" I didn't call him a moron, but only because that didn't immediately come to my mind.

I fervently hope that the jurors, unlike the judge, aren’t flummoxed by truth.