Definition
Subornation is the criminal act of procuring, inducing, or persuading another person to commit an unlawful act. In nearly all legal contexts, the term appears as subornation of perjury — the specific offense of causing or persuading another person to give false testimony under oath. The procurer (the suborner) is treated as a principal to the underlying offense, not merely as an accessory.
To be complete, the offense requires: (1) that the suborner solicited or procured the other person to testify falsely; (2) that the person actually gave false testimony under oath in a proceeding requiring an oath; and (3) that the false testimony constituted perjury — meaning it was material and willfully false. If the witness testifies truthfully, or if the underlying testimony does not rise to perjury, the subornation charge generally fails, though an attempt charge may survive.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The procuring of someone to do a criminal act, especially to commit perjury.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of procuring a person to take a false oath constituting perjury; also, more broadly, the procuring of anyone to commit a criminal or bad act by bribes or persuasion.
The common and legal meanings are close but the legal meaning is narrower in practice. Outside law, Webster's 1913 and literary usage (Shakespeare's "foul subornation") apply the word to any corrupt procurement — bribing a witness to disappear, procuring fraud, inducing any wrongdoing. In modern law, subornation has contracted almost entirely to perjury contexts. A researcher encountering the broader sense in historical sources should not assume a perjury charge is necessarily present.
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Common Confusion
SUBORNATION vs. OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE / WITNESS TAMPERING: Modern statutory systems have largely absorbed subornation of perjury into broader obstruction and witness-tampering frameworks. Federal law, for example, addresses suborning perjury under the perjury statutes but also criminalizes witness tampering and obstruction independently. A researcher in modern materials may find conduct that would historically have been called subornation charged instead under obstruction statutes. The elements and required proof differ across these theories; do not treat the terms as interchangeable when analyzing charges.
SUBORNATION vs. CONSPIRACY: Subornation requires the underlying perjury to actually occur. Conspiracy to commit perjury does not. Historical sources sometimes conflate the two, particularly in older treatise discussions where the word "procuring" does significant work.
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Why It Matters in Research
Subornation is one of those terms where the label has remained stable but the surrounding legal architecture has shifted considerably. In sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — including Blackstone and the treatise tradition Burrill draws on — subornation of perjury was a distinct common law misdemeanor with its own doctrinal history, and courts analyzed it on its own terms. In modern practice, the common law offense has largely been codified or superseded by statute, and the word itself appears less frequently in charging documents than it once did.
Researchers working in historical materials should watch for the critical requirement that the false oath actually be completed: at common law, the suborner was not guilty unless the perjury was actually committed. Solicitation that did not result in a completed false oath was treated differently — sometimes as an attempt, sometimes not criminally reached at all depending on the jurisdiction and period. Burrill's entry flags this ("the false oath must be ac—" the entry appears truncated) but the full rule, as stated in Blackstone and Stephen, is that completion of the perjury is the traditional prerequisite.
The broader historical meaning — procuring anyone to commit any criminal act — appears in older equity and ecclesiastical materials. When reading pre-nineteenth-century English sources, do not assume subornation automatically signals a perjury context.
Corpus researchers should also note that because subornation is definitionally derivative (it requires an underlying perjury), materials on subornation will always connect to the perjury doctrine of the same jurisdiction and period. The materiality requirement for perjury, for instance, flows directly into subornation analysis.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief and textbook-sourced, drawing directly on Blackstone's Commentaries (4 Bl. Com. 137) and Stephen's Criminal Law. This is consistent with how the term was treated across the major nineteenth-century dictionaries: subornation of perjury was considered a well-settled common law category, not a contested one, and dictionary entries tended simply to point to Blackstone and move on.
Blackstone's formulation — that the suborner must procure "such a false oath as constitutes perjury in the principal" — is the foundational statement, and it carries two important implications that historical dictionaries tend not to unpack: first, that the underlying act must meet the full definition of perjury (including materiality), not merely involve a false statement; and second, that the suborner's guilt is architecturally dependent on the principal's guilt. If the principal has a defense, it may unravel the subornation charge.
Webster's 1913 preserves the older, broader usage — procuring any bad or criminal act — which reflects the term's genuine historical range before legal usage narrowed it. Researchers should treat the Webster's sense as the historically accurate wider meaning and the Burrill/Blackstone sense as the technically operative legal meaning for criminal law purposes.
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Jurisdictional Note
Common law subornation of perjury has been codified in most U.S. jurisdictions, but the elements and penalties vary. Some states have folded the offense into general perjury or obstruction statutes; others maintain it as a separately enumerated crime. Federal law addresses it within the perjury framework. English law, the original source of the common law offense, has similarly moved toward statutory formulation.
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