Another angle on lying

[nancylebov]

papersky has a discussion of lying, which reminded me that "It's not the crime, it's the coverup" gets on my nerves. Isn't that common phrase a way of saying "how you treat a government investigation is more important than any injuries you might have done to anyone else"?

Comments

[sethg]

I have always understood "it's not the crime, it's the coverup" to mean "the things that white-collar criminals do out of a panic to avoid getting caught make them even more likely to get caught".

[redbird]

I think it started as something like "perjury is worse than stealing money from the government", which I suspect connects to a vague feeling that a lot of people are quietly cheating on their taxes, filing for and getting subsidies and payments that they aren't strictly entitled to, and the like. But your neighbor who lied on his income tax didn't subvert the FBI to go after his personal enemies.

This seems vaguely connected to the sort of situation--which certainly turns up in detective novels, and I think also in real life--where someone starts by stealing something relatively small, and then commits additional crimes in order to avoid being caught for the first theft, and eventually is on trial for murder.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I can see the senses in all of the comments so far, but what I think is really the message--and it's a good one--is that you might think you have a good reason for committing this crime or the other, but eventually you're moving into the realm of crime just to avoid punishment that you know you deserve. A crime can be an impulse, a mistake, a good idea gone bad, but subversion of the justice system has to be willful, deliberate, and malicious.

Also, anyone can commit a crime, but if you're in a position where you're one of the people who is creating the framework of the rule of law itself, subversion of that rule does seem to me to be a particular offense.