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Originally Posted by lawgolfer

Anyone posting on this topic should first read the Court's opinion.

The prosecutor focused on two statements Miller made in response to leading questions asked by the investigators. At the time, the investigators had Miller's phone records and knew that he had made phone calls to Search. While Miller answered in the negative to the leading questions, in other answers, he admitted to making phone calls in the time frame about which he was asked, but was uncertain, if not evasive, as to the dates or the topics.

In many jurisdictions, when the investigators already know a fact, such as the phone records they had at the time of the interview, Miller's answers would not be material and not prosecutable. However, as the Court explains in a footnote, Florida law is different. You can easily read into the fact that the court even discussed the issue of "materiality", that the Justices were not happy at the conduct of the investigators and recognized that they were working to get Miller to commit perjury and not to discover the true facts.

Not being able to reverse the conviction on the issue of "materiality", the Court examined Miller's false statements in the "entire context" of his many answers. Doing so, they ruled that the many contradictory answers, taken as a whole and not individually, were insufficient to support a conviction for perjury.

As a practicing attorney for 40 years who was both a Federal and State prosecutor, I fully agree with the Court's opinion. In a criminal investigation, the goal of an investigator should be to determine if a crime was committed and not to cause a crime, perjury, to be committed. Unfortunately, the latter has become a dominant tactic of many investigators and prosecutors. In simple terms, it is: " I don't know that we can build a strong enough case against him. Instead, let's see if we can get him to lie". Frankly, this is not the way our investigators and prosecutors should go about their business.

I am not for or against Miller and Search. In this case, the investigators should have had the phone records before them at the time of the interview; shown them to Miller; asked him if he made the phone calls; and, then, asked what was discussed in those calls. If Miller was evasive or, foolishly, denied making the many calls, he would have been convicted at trial for a violation of the "Sunshine" laws with near-certainty.

He seemed to get a raw deal. That does not sound like why the Sunshine Law was written with how the authorities used it in the Oren Miller case.