Judge orders man who lied under oath to read 'Integrity'

[Ian David]

WORCESTER, Mass. -- A Worcester Superior Court judge has ordered a man convicted of perjury to read a book entitled "Integrity" and then write a 1,000-word essay on what he's learned from the book and his conduct.

Alan Koren, 43, the former owner of a Gardner pallet company, was found guilty of lying under oath during a 2002 state Department of Industrial Accidents hearing on a compensation claim filed by an injured employee, the Telegram and Gazette reported Saturday.

Judge Francis Fecteau sentenced him to 2-1/2 years in the House of Correction, but suspended the sentence for three years with probation. The convict, however, must meet several condition of probation.

The judge gave Koren 90 days to read the book written by Yale law professor Stephen Carter. The convict has additional 60 days to write the essay "on his conduct in this case, the lessons he's learned, the lessons he's learned from the book, and why he thinks I ordered him to read it," Fecteau said in his ruling.

More:
http://www3.whdh.com/news/articles/local/BO47624/

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Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
Why do we care more about winning than about playing by the rules?

Integrity - all of us are in favor of it, but nobody seems to know how to make sure that we get it. From presidential candidates to crusading journalists to the lords of collegiate sports, everybody promises to deliver integrity, yet all too often, the promises go unfulfilled.

Stephen Carter examines why the virtue of integrity holds such sway over the American political imagination. By weaving together insights from philosophy, theology, history and law, along with examples drawn from current events and a dose of personal experience, Carter offers a vision of integrity that has implications for everything from marriage and politics to professional football. He discusses the difficulties involved in trying to legislate integrity as well as the possibilities for teaching it.

As the Cleveland Plain Dealer said, "In a measured and sensible voice, Carter attempts to document some of the paradoxes and pathologies that result from pervasive ethical realism... If the modern drift into relativism has left us in a cultural and political morass, Carter suggests that the assumption of personal integrity is the way out."

<snip>

Following his graduation from law school, Professor Carter served as law clerk to Judge Spottswood W. Robinson III of the United States Court of Appeals in Washington D.C., and, the next year, as law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court of the United States. After practicing law for a year, Professor Carter joined the Yale faculty in 1982. Three years later, he became one of the youngest members of the faculty ever voted tenure.

His critically acclaimed books include The Culture of Disbelief and Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. He is currently at work on Civility, the sequel to Integrity. Professor Carter lives with his family in Connecticut.

# Paperback
# ISBN: 0060928077
# Pub. Date: January 1997

Barnes & Noble http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780060928070&itm=1
Overstock.com http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?page=proframe&prod_id=179971
Powells Books http://www.powells.com/biblio/0060928077

[Auggie]

1. Did he have to sit in the corner and wear a dunce hat too?

[soothsayer]

3. he had to write "I will not commit perjury" 100 times on a blackboard

[hobbit709]

2. Can we make everyone in the WH and the RNC

read it too?

[goddess40]

4. That would be a life sentence for *

First, it would take him forever to read the book but to put together an essay with 1000 coherent words would never happen.

[hobbit709]

5. And the problem with that is?

[marions ghost]

6. lying under oath is so common

that most people accept it as the norm these days. You just expect the accused and witnesses in any case to lie. "Everybody does it" is the excuse. And then when you have corrupt leaders (local and national), and legal & business role models like those out there today, you can hardly blame the average Joe for losing his moral anchor.

I want to read this book. Good luck to anyone who hopes to revive integrity as a societal goal. Maybe by reading this book people can figure out what it is. But that still doesn't mean that people will buy into it as a better way to live. I admire the judge's efforts but I think it ignores basic psychology. The judge is asking the offender to accept a theoretical attitude --schoolbook style. But high-minded behavior may not seem so smart in the real world, where anyone with a sense of "integrity" will be likely trampled. Or at least stolen from. In the real dog-eat-dog situation in America today everyone thinks they have the right to grab what they can and lie about it.

Another book on this subject--"The Cheating Culture" by David Callahan
http://www.cheatingculture.com/

[marions ghost]

7. Is this a good way to teach honesty?

Read an Excerpt from "Integrity"
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780060928070&itm=1

"My first lesson in integrity came the hard way. It was 1960 or thereabouts and I was a first-grader at P.S. 129 in Harlem. The teacher had us all sitting in a circle, playing a game in which each child would take a turn donning a blindfold and then trying to identify objects by touch alone as she handed them to us. If you guessed right, you stayed in until the next round. If you guessed wrong, you were out. I survived almost to the end, amazing the entire class with my abilities. Then, to my dismay, the teacher realized what I had known, and relied upon, from the start: my blindfold was tied imperfectly and a sliver of bright reality leaked in from outside. By holding the unknown object in my lap instead of out in front of me, as most of the other children did, I could see at least a corner or a side and sometimes more — but always enough to figure out what it was. So my remarkable success was due only to my ability to break the rules.

Fortunately for my own moral development, I was caught. And as a result of being caught, I suffered, in front of my classmates, a humiliating reminder of right and wrong: I had cheated at the game. Cheating was wrong. It was that simple.

I do not remember many of the details of the "public" lecture that I received from my teacher. I do remember that I was made to feel terribly ashamed; and it is good that I was made to feel that way, for I had something to be ashamed of. The moral opprobrium that accompanied that shame was sufficiently intense that it has stayed with me ever since, which is exactly how shame is supposed to work. And as I grew older, whenever I was even tempted to cheat — at a game, on homework — Iwould remember my teacher's stern face and the humiliation of sitting before my classmates, revealed to the world as a cheater.

That was then, this is now. Browsing recently in my local bookstore, I came across a book that boldly proclaimed, on its cover, that it contained instructions on how to cheat — the very word occurred in the title — at a variety of video games. My instincts tell me that this cleverly chosen title is helping the book to sell very well. For it captures precisely what is wrong with America today: we care far more about winning than about playing by the rules.

Consider just a handful of examples, drawn from headlines of the mid-1990s: the winner of the Miss Virginia pageant is stripped of her title after officials determine that her educational credentials are false; a television network is forced to apologize for using explosives to add a bit of verisimilitude to a tape purporting to show that a particular truck is unsafe; and the authors of a popular book on management are accused of using bulk purchases at key stores to manipulate the New York Times best-seller list. Go back a few more years and we can add in everything from a slew of Wall Street titans imprisoned for violating a bewildering variety of laws in their frantic effort to get ahead, to the women's Boston Marathon winner branded a cheater for spending part of the race on the subway. But cheating is evidently no big deal: some 70 percent of college students admit to having done it at least once."
(more at link)

[Donald Ian Rankin]

8. Isn't there something in the constitution about "cruel and unusual punishment"?

I'm deeply unhappy about judges being able to impose their own, as opposed to the states', values onto convicts. I think that "read Integrity or go to prison" is one end of a slippery slope with "convert to Christianity or go to prison" at the other end, not very far away.

[WinkyDink]

9. Lesson learned: Money is a "Get Out of Jail" card.

[marions ghost]

10. so you see this

as a case of a business owner getting off. Should he have gone to jail?

I agree that making him read books is probably not going to change anything.