SUPREME COURT OF THE CANAL ZONE.

convicted of perjury, the judgment had been reversed by the Circuit Court and an appeal from such reversal carried by the State to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of Ohio, affirming the judgment of the Circuit Court, discussed at length the peculiar and unusual characteristics of the crime of perjury, the difficulties attending proof of the crime, and the limitations which ought to be placed upon a prosecution because of the unusual, peculiar elements of the crime, and then said:
Therefore, we consider that, when one is charged with the grave crime of perjury, it is but a just safeguard that more than purely circumstantial evidence shall be adduced to establish the corpus delicti; and we hold it to be the general rule that the falsity of the matter assigned as perjury must be testified to by at least one witness, and that he be corroborated by another witness or by facts and circumstances which will operate as a sufficient corroboration.
Counsel for the Government in the case now before us insists that the rule of evidence requiring one living witness testifying directly to the corpus deliciti and sufficient corroborating circumstances is not in force in the Canal Zone and that if such rule is in force it is sufficiently met by the testimony of Burgoon.
It is true that no such rule of evidence has heretofore been stated by this court. There has arisen no occasion for such statement. But the whole body of criminal law in force on te Canal Zone has been transplanted from the United States. and in criminal cases the courts of the Canal Zone have invariably followed and enforced the same rules of evidence enforced by the courts of the United States. There is no reason known to us why an exception should be made with respect to the rule undet consideration. On the contrary there is every reason why the rule should be followed in this American jurisdiction as well as in other American jurisdictions. It is a rule which has developed from the very nature of the crime of perjury. It might be said of it as was said by Judge Werner of the theory of the presumption of innocence when delivering the court's- opinion in the case of People vs. Molineux (268 N. Y., 264) that it is the product of the wisdom and humanity of the ages. And, too, it is a beneficient rule making for the safety of individuals. Witnesses in judicial proceedings are so likely, through unconscious bias or misinformation or wrong legal advice, to make misstatements as to material facts, and language itself is so faulty a medium for the conveyance of the average man's ideas th'tt a charge which is primarily basec on the corruptly false use of language ought to be difficult of proof.

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