Definition
To suborn is to corruptly procure another person to commit a crime — most commonly perjury. The term appears most frequently in the phrase "suborn perjury" (or "subornation of perjury"), which describes the act of inducing, persuading, or procuring a witness or other person to give false sworn testimony. The offense lies in the procurement itself: the suborner does not personally commit perjury but is criminally responsible for causing another to do so.
More broadly, to suborn can mean to secretly or corruptly procure any unlawful act, though this wider usage has receded in modern legal practice and the term is now almost exclusively associated with perjury.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To induce someone to commit an unlawful or malicious act, especially in a corrupt manner; specifically, to induce a witness to commit perjury.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To procure another to take a false oath amounting to perjury; also, to procure privately or by collusion, to incite secretly, to instigate.
The common and legal meanings are close but not identical. In ordinary historical usage, "suborn" carried a broader sense of secret instigation toward any wrongful purpose — Shakespeare used it to mean simply "set up against" or "instigate." In law, the term hardened into a technical offense: subornation of perjury is a specific crime, not a general description of corrupt inducement. A researcher encountering "suborn" in older literary or non-legal sources should not assume the narrow legal meaning applies.
Common Confusion
Suborn is sometimes confused with accessory liability or conspiracy. The distinctions matter. A suborner is not merely an accessory to perjury — subornation is its own substantive offense. Conspiracy to commit perjury requires an agreement between two or more parties and may require an overt act; subornation focuses on the act of procurement and does not always require proof of a prior agreement. Additionally, suborn should not be conflated with bribery, though bribery is frequently the method used: suborning a witness by paying them is both subornation and bribery, but the offenses are analytically distinct.
Why It Matters in Research
The term almost always appears in the compound form "subornation of perjury" in case law and statutory texts. Researchers searching for standalone uses of "suborn" in historical legal materials — particularly those predating the mid-twentieth century — will find it used more loosely, sometimes to describe corrupt procurement of acts other than perjury (bribing an official, procuring false evidence, inducing a juror). This broader usage has largely disappeared from modern statutes and opinions, where subornation is tightly confined to perjury.
In historical sources, note that the offense of subornation of perjury was treated as distinct from perjury itself in terms of punishment, and whether the procured person actually completed the perjury was a contested element in older common law authorities. Some historical texts required the underlying perjury to have been completed for subornation to be actionable; modern statutes in many jurisdictions do not follow this strict rule and punish the procurement attempt regardless of whether perjury was actually committed. A researcher reading older cases must determine which rule applied in that jurisdiction at that time.
The relationship between suborn and witness tampering is also a research trap. Modern federal and state codes often criminalize obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and witness retaliation as separate offenses, partially overlapping with historical subornation. A conduct pattern that would have been charged as subornation under older law may appear under entirely different headings in modern practice. Cross-referencing statutory indices with both historical and modern vocabulary is essential.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in strong agreement on the core definition: to suborn is to procure another to commit perjury. All four cite or track Stephen's Criminal Law as the primary authority. The definitions are substantively consistent across editions of Black's.
Burrill adds the most texture of the four, preserving the Latin derivation (subornare, from sub and ornare) and the memorable gloss from the civil law tradition — subornare est quasi subtus in aure ipsum male ornare, to suborn is to instruct one privily, as by whispering in his ear — which captures the essence of the offense: secret, corrupt instruction rather than open inducement. This gloss usefully distinguishes suborning from more direct forms of procurement.
Anderson's entry is notable for its organizational clarity: it distinguishes the verb (to suborn), the actor (suborner), and the offense (subornation), and cross-references perjury. This structure reflects how courts and treatise writers have consistently analyzed the term — separating the act of procurement from the underlying offense and from the party who executes it.
None of the historical dictionaries address the modern issue of whether completion of the underlying perjury is required, nor do they engage with the relationship between subornation and modern obstruction-of-justice statutes. Researchers should treat these sources as reliable for the common law baseline but insufficient for modern statutory analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
Most U.S. jurisdictions codify subornation of perjury as a separate felony offense, sometimes embedded within a broader perjury statute and sometimes as a standalone provision. Federal law addresses procuring false testimony under obstruction and perjury provisions rather than using the word "suborn" explicitly. English law has largely absorbed the conduct into broader statutory perjury and perverting-the-course-of-justice offenses. The label "subornation of perjury" is more common in state common-law-derived codes than in modern federal drafting.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Perjury; Obstruction of Justice; Witness Tampering