“My 87-year-old father has been arrested and jailed three times by my mentally ill mother, who is using domestic violence laws to her advantage in a divorce. This is a man who served in the military for 20 years, the federal government for 25 years, and the Department of Social Services for five years before retiring. My dad has never even had so much as a speeding ticket in his entire life, but now, at the end of his life, he has been humiliated, placed on supervised probation, and will probably lose everything due to the abuse of domestic violence laws. Nobody in law enforcement will listen to what is really going on here. Even though I had prior knowledge that my dad was being set up, I have actually been told by the District Attorney…and I quote, ‘I have convicted your father of assault on a female, and I will convict him of everything else I can.’ The justice system has gone off the rails, and the truth means nothing. My father fought in World War II and in Korea to keep this country free, and this is how he is repaid.”

—E-petition respondent

How did you spend the yuletide? With friends and family, listening to Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby, mussing kids’ hair and congratulating them on their Christmas spoils?

Read the epigraph above, and you’ll have a pretty clear idea of what Todd L. of Wilmington, North Carolina had on his mind. Not much to raise a cup of cheer to, is it?

Two hours after Todd shared his story on the e-petition “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence,” a fellow North Carolinian opined, “There should be a legal penalty for false accusations!”

Lawmakers have agreed, actually, and statutes making lying to the court a felony crime are universal. What this commenter should have said is that legal penalties for false accusations should be enforced.

Perjury is never prosecuted. District attorneys will tell you that if they did prosecute perjurers, there’d be no resources left for putting “dangerous people” behind bars.

Let’s parse that logic.

First, it actually recognizes that lying occurs a lot. If it only occurred now and then, prosecutions would be few and hardly a budgetary strain.

Second, recognizing that lying occurs a lot also recognizes that the so-called dangerous people the state prefers to prosecute may simply be victims of false allegations. Preferring to prosecute alleged domestic assailants, therefore—take, for example, the 87-year-old man cited in this post’s epigraph—may mean preferring to prosecute the falsely accused (the innocent) over the genuinely criminal (the false accusers).

Ask yourself which would look better on the books: “We’ve successfully prosecuted [x number of] wife-beaters” or “We’ve successfully prosecuted [x number of] perjurers”? Everyone knows what wife-beater means. How many people even know what a perjurer is?

“If we did prosecute perjurers, there’d be no resources left for putting dangerous people behind bars…so we’ll prosecute the people perjurers falsely accuse of being dangerous”—as analysis of most of the arguments made in defense of domestic violence and restraining order policies reveals, the reasoning is circular and smells foul. It’s in fact unreasoned “reasoning” that’s really just something to say to distract attention from unflattering truths that don’t win elections, federal grants, popular esteem, or political favor. So entrenched are these policies and so megalithic (and lucrative) that rhetoric like this actually passes for satisfactory when it’s used by someone in a crisp suit with a crisper title.

Obviously it wouldn’t be necessary to prosecute all perjurers to arrest epidemic lying. Ensuring that false allegations were made less frequently would only entail putting a few frauds in cages for a year or two where they belong, making examples of them, and revising policy so that the consequences of lying were impressed upon other would-be frauds. As it is, policy (including menacing rhetoric on court documents like restraining orders) is to impress upon defendants how serious the consequences of being lied about are: “For being publicly lied about, you may be subject to arrest and incarceration for being publicly lied about some more.”

The absurdity is patent, as is the wanton cruelty. Applying the word justice to any aspect of this policy should itself be criminal.

The 87-year-old man referenced in the epigraph above may be at the end of his life, and it’s a reasonable surmise that whatever remaining time he could have hoped for will be shortened by the treatment he’s received from the country in whose service he’s dedicated over half of that life.

If a YouTube video were posted of state agents bludgeoning an 87-year-old veteran, it would shortly go viral, reporters would elbow their way onto the man’s front stoop, lawyers would scrap and scrabble to represent him, and cable commentators would decry the outrage of the abuse.

Heads would roll.

Since state agents have instead subjected this man to public denigration and dehumanizing psychic torments under the guise of propriety, the odds are strong that he’ll slip away erelong, invisibly, his final days having been poisoned by anguish, disgrace, and the unrelenting consciousness that 50 years of public service were callously invalidated: “I have convicted your father of assault on a female, and I will convict him of everything else I can.”

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