United States v. Fred J. Lighte

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• stating that statements may not be isolated from their context when raising an ambiguity defense
• explaining that, in a perjury case, a jury must “determine whether the question—as the declarant must have understood it giving it a reasonable reading—was falsely answered”
• explaining that even if a question is ambiguous, “if the response given was false as the defendant understood the question, his conviction is not invalidated by the fact that his answer to the question might generate a number of different interpretations.”
• finding two questions fundamentally ambiguous “because of the imprecise use of the pronoun ‘you,’ ” where the examiner did not distinguish between defendant’s actions as a trustee and as an individual
• encouraging prosecutor on remand to withdraw from jury’s consideration questions that were ambiguous, although not fundamentally ambiguous
• in absence of special verdict, court unable to conclude which of several statements the jury considered to be perjurious

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).