Definition
A suborner is a person who induces, procures, or causes another to commit a crime — most commonly perjury. The suborner acts behind the scenes: the crime is carried out by the person suborned, but the suborner bears criminal responsibility for engineering it. The term describes an actor, not an act; the corresponding offense is subornation.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who suborns.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who suborns or procures another to take a false oath; one who procures another to do a bad action.
The common and legal meanings are closely aligned here — both treat the suborner as the procuring party behind another's wrongful act. The only meaningful gap is one of scope: ordinary usage in the Webster's tradition gravitates toward the false oath scenario, while the legal definition encompasses procurement of any crime. A researcher reading historical nonlegal texts that use suborner should not assume the perjury context is exclusive.
Common Confusion
Suborner and suborned witness are occasionally conflated in older texts. The suborner is the procuring party; the suborned witness is the instrument — the one who actually commits perjury or other crime at the suborner's instigation. Their legal exposure differs: the suborner faces liability for subornation, while the suborned witness faces liability for the underlying offense (typically perjury), even if the procurement is a mitigating circumstance. Historical sources sometimes use suborned loosely to describe either party; context must resolve the reference.
Why It Matters in Research
Suborner is an agent noun — it names the person, while the operative legal concept researchers will find litigated and defined in primary sources is the offense of subornation (most often subornation of perjury). When searching historical reporters and digests, queries for suborner alone will return limited results; the bulk of relevant doctrine appears under subornation. Researchers tracing criminal liability for induced perjury should move quickly from this term to its parent concept.
The limitation of the historical dictionary entries here is worth noting: both Black's editions define suborner primarily by reference to perjury, but subornation doctrine extended to other crimes — inducing false testimony before grand juries, procuring another to commit treason, and similar offenses. The perjury context dominates because it was historically the most prosecuted form, but researchers working in other substantive areas should not assume the term is confined to it.
Modern criminal codes rarely use the word suborner as a term of art. Statutes addressing this conduct typically speak of "procuring," "inducing," or "soliciting" perjury or obstruction, and the actor is identified functionally rather than by this label. Researchers moving between historical common law sources and modern statutory materials must bridge that terminological gap.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's first and second editions are in complete agreement — nearly verbatim — defining suborner as one who suborns or procures another to commit any crime, with perjury specifically flagged. Webster's 1913 aligns closely, though it narrows the definition slightly toward the false oath context and the general procurement of "a bad action," which reflects ordinary usage of the period more than the legal precision of the Black's formulations. No meaningful divergence exists across these sources; the term was stable in meaning throughout the period these dictionaries covered.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is any analysis of the mental state required, the degree of participation necessary to qualify as a suborner versus a mere accessory, or how courts distinguished active procurement from passive acquiescence. Those questions were worked out in case law under the heading of subornation, not in dictionary treatment of the agent noun.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Subornation of Perjury; Accessory and Accomplice Liability.