Does the Truth Matter Anymore?

We live in a world and at a time in history where you’ll frequently hear people question whether the truth matters? Usually it’s more of a lament than a question.

But, you can look at just about at any time period and there will be plenty of examples of the truth getting lost among lies. For example, did Joan of Arc truly deserve to be burned at the stake? Or, were the charges against her lies made up to get rid of her as a political liability?

And, sometimes it is absolutely essential to lie. A prime example, and one we can marvel at, is keeping the D-Day invasion secret. In fact, Winston Churchill famously said “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”  So does that mean that lying is good? Or was the truth about the invasion so important that everybody (and their brothers) agreed that so many lives depended upon it that it had to be hidden at all costs?

So why am I discussing the truth? It is because our justice system relies on it every day. The goal of the legal system is to try to find the truth. But, the reality is that people lie.  Usually when a person lies they justify their conduct to themselves. If we could listen in on a person’s thoughts we might hear a big company executive think “if we admit out product is dangerous we will lose sales, our shareholders will be furious and our jobs will be lost, so we need to lie to protect ourselves.”  Sounds almost like it is a good thing to lie. Lie and save jobs and make money. What could be better?

When we take on a case we fight hard to cut through the lies. We investigate, we research, and we hire experts to look at evidence. If a big company is lying the odds are pretty good that the lies will be found out. For example, in one case we uncovered that a drunk truck driver who rear-ended our clients had an active driver license in multiple states (just in case one license got suspended so he could keep driving). In another case we uncovered that a scaffolding collapsed killing several construction workers because an engineer tried to cover up an error in a computer calculation that left the scaffolding grossly under designed, but attractive to the engineering company’s customers because it was very cheap to build.

To our clients the truth matters. To us the truth matters. We can handle the truth.