Raise Your Right Hand

The Severed Sentence

The book's first claim has a name and a number, because everything in it stands on it. Law One: every oath is a conditional self-curse with the punishment clause amputated. The oldest legal language on record refuses to separate the oath from its penalty. In Akkadian one word runs the whole circuit, promise, demon, and disease at once. The Hittite army swore with wax melting in the flame as its stand-in. Hesiod's gods pay a ten-year penalty schedule for perjury by the Styx. Rome put the curse in the fist, a flint stone and a spoken condition, and Iceland reddened a two-ounce ring in the blood of the sacrifice. The modern courtroom keeps the props and speaks the stump, and the stump still conducts, because the punishment clause did not evaporate. It moved.

One chapter takes the verse that threatens the whole apparatus at its full width: swear not at all, from the Sermon on the Mount, with no exception in it and no saving clause for courts of law. Augustine's crutch and Aquinas's three companions defused it for fifteen centuries, and in February of 1527 a company of hunted people at Schleitheim simply believed it, and the charge under the system finally went off.

The Machine

Movement II is the law built out of sworn mouths: compurgation's arithmetic of neighbors, the ordeal's scheduled miracle and its withdrawal in 1215, the jury whose Latin name admits what it is, the sworn. Then the oath that asked too much: the ex officio oath, which administered the swearing before the charge was named, and which a twenty-three-year-old apprentice named John Lilburne refused at the cost of the whip, the pillory, the sun, and the gag. The record of that day survives in the sworn testimony of a woman named Mary Dorman, which is to say the oath that could not have his words ended up carrying hers. The House of Commons answered in 1641 with five adjectives in its own Journal: bloody, wicked, cruel, barbarous, and tyrannical. Three hundred and twenty-eight years later, Miranda v. Arizona named Lilburne's trial the critical historical event behind the privilege against self-incrimination, and the card in the detective's pocket became the refusal's liturgy.

The movement closes with the invention of perjury itself, the statute of 1563 with its birth-certificate title in period spelling, the pillory and the letter P, and Coke's elements polished out of the act's muddy text. No oath, no perjury: the false sentence unsworn is not a crime at all, which is the proof that the ritual, and only the ritual, is load-bearing.

The Refusers

Movement III belongs to the people who would not say the words. The Quakers, jailed by the thousand for declining a formula, who kept the count of their own sufferings because a people that keeps records expects to be believed someday. The Jews of the more judaico oath, for whom the punishment clause was restored in full as an instrument of contempt, the curse reattached for one despised class of swearer, and the scholars and advocates who argued the apparatus down state by state. And Charles Bradlaugh, the most famous unbeliever in England, elected to Parliament and refused both doors: the Clock Tower lockup, the ejection at the door, the Testament from his own pocket, thirteen dated refusals read aloud by the House itself, the apology that arrived three days before his grave. The oath's whole long war ended where it had to end: in the book, on the page, legible in the record.

The Signature

The last movement is the modern settlement, and the book's second law: the penalty migrated from the next world into this one, capacity first, belief completing, God's vengeance becoming the perjury statute. The Constitution never names God, and its oath clauses carry the affirmation in a parenthesis the refusers spent three centuries writing. The flexible modern rule lets the form bend to the conscience it once tested. The child's promise, measured in the laboratory, turns out to be the oath's smallest working form. The deception experiments put a number on the spell: the solemn sworn sentence cuts lying by a third under a live incentive to lie. And the hand's last position is the signature, the printed line above the name, under penalty of perjury, where the whole three-thousand-year apparatus comes to rest.

Table of Contents

Front Matter: Copyright · Dedication · Epigraphs · Contents

Movement I. The Curse: 1. So Help Me · 2. The Sacramentum · 3. The Hand Itself · 4. Swear Not at All

Movement II. The Machine: 5. Twelve Sworn Men · 6. The Oath That Asks Too Much · 7. The Gatekeeper's Oath · 8. Inventing Perjury

Movement III. The Refusers: 9. The People Called Quakers · 10. More Judaico · 11. The Member for Northampton · 12. The Oaths Act

Movement IV. The Signature: 13. Oath or Affirmation · 14. The Whole Truth · 15. The Spell, Measured · 16. Under Penalty of Perjury

End Matter: Acknowledgments · Glossary · A Note on Sources · Bibliography · The Corrections Ledger · Questions for Discussion · Index · About the Author · Also By the Author

The Epigraphs

“Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

The oath administered to witnesses in American courtrooms, every working day.

“But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.”

The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 5:37, Authorized Version, 1611.

“I declare (or certify, verify, or state) under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct. Executed on (date). (Signature).”

Title 28, United States Code, section 1746, enacted October 18, 1976.

A Note on the Free PDF

A book built on the public record should be free to weigh against its own receipts, so the full text is here at no charge. The web edition is a formatted PDF with embedded fonts, a clickable table of contents, and a linked, page-numbered index, built for screen reading, home printing, or the archive. The whole book is here, cover through the index, every claim with its receipt attached. Download it, read it, and measure the argument against the record it names.

Dedication

For Janna,

and for everyone who kept the hand down.