17. Forgery and perjury

Forgery

Section 1 of the Forgery Act 1913: Forgery is making a false document in order that it may be used as genuine. A document is false if it purports to be made by, or on behalf of, a person who did not make it and did not authorise it. Mead v Young is the bill of exchange that reached the wrong man of the same name. The document told a lie about who had made it.

Date and place: If the date or the place of making is material, a document that lies about that date or place is false. Antedating can be forgery when the date is of the essence of the deed. The lecture's story of the Ratson conveyance mixes 1868 and 1969. Do not memorise those dates. The principle is enough.

What is not a document: R v Closs holds that a painting with a false artist's name on it was not a forgery. The mark was not a document. R v Smith holds that baking-powder wrappers copied from another maker were not forgery. A document, for this purpose, is writing that conveys a statement from a person. A thermometer reading is not that writing. An examination script written by the wrong student is the lecture's borderline example: the script as an expression of knowledge is not, without more, a forged document, but a signature pretending to be the candidate's is.

One's own cheque: In R v Martin the accused, known to the seller, signed a cheque in a false first name. The court held it was not a false document, because he was not pretending the cheque was made by someone else. The proper charge was obtaining by false pretences. A false name is not automatically a forgery.

Intent: For a private document the prosecution must prove an intent to defraud. For a public document, an intent to defraud or to deceive can suffice, on the lecture's split. Buckley J in Re London and Globe Finance Corporation Ltd [1903] 1 Ch 728 distinguished the words. To deceive is to induce a person to believe that a thing is true which is false. To defraud is to deprive a person of something by that deceit. Do not invent a page number.

Uttering: Section 6 makes it an offence to utter a forged document, which includes using, offering, delivering or tendering it. The person must know that it is forged. The lecture asks whether a photocopy is an uttering. The Act's list is the starting point. Do not answer the photocopy question with a case the notes do not contain.

Perjury

Section 1 of the Perjury Act 1911: A person lawfully sworn as a witness or interpreter in a judicial proceeding, who wilfully makes a statement material in that proceeding which he knows to be false or does not believe to be true. An affirmation counts as an oath. Judicial proceeding includes a person lawfully empowered to take evidence on oath, not only a courtroom.

Material: The statement must matter. It may be a fact or an opinion, such as a witness's estimate of speed. It is material if it could affect the result or the witness's credibility. The lecture's sentence, that a statement is material only if it is "so irrelevant" that the witness was not speaking as a witness, is the wrong way round. Ignore that sentence. Materiality is for the judge. The Sierra Leone chapter says so.

A statement that happens to be true: The accused can still be guilty if he believed it was false, or did not believe it was true. The offence is the wilful falsehood, not the accident that the words matched the facts.

Corroboration: Section 13 provides that a person is not to be convicted of perjury solely on the evidence of one witness as to the falsity of the statement. One witness corroborated by other evidence, including the accused's own admission, can be enough. Two witnesses are sufficient. They are not always necessary.

Subornation: Section 7 punishes procuring another person to commit perjury. The local working-out is Bob-Jones v Reginam, in the chapter on offences against the administration of justice. A child under seven is not a competent accused, for the reason already given in the infancy chapter, not because perjury has a special age.