Reprobation of Testimonies (Reprobatio Attestationum)

REPROBATION OF TESTIMONIES (Reprobatio Attestationum). - It is a legal institution which the CIC, deriving it from the ius vetus, regulates in cann. 1783 no. 2, 1784 and 1785, and which is also found in the more recent (6 Jan. 1950) motu proprio Sollicitudinem nostram for Oriental trials (cann. 306-308).

In substance, once the testimonies have been made public, the parties have the right to reprove them, that is, to challenge them, adducing arguments and documents and also invoking other testimonies to demonstrate that one or more witnesses have asserted what is false. The judge, unless he considers the r. manifestly futile or inspired by dilatory purposes, grants the request and proceeds to the treatment of the question in the usual form of incidental matters (can. 1837 ff.) and, that is, either in a formal and solemn manner to be defined by an interlocutory sentence (generally after the agreement of the doubts), or by simple decree (can. 1840). The outcome of the incidental matter will therefore be a ruling by the judge declaring that the witness has not spoken falsely, or that he has spoken falsely and that no account can be taken of him. After that the trial on the merits resumes and the case continues its course.

It should be noted that the r. is a purely civil-law institution; that is, it does not imply a criminal proceeding for perjury against the witness, nor can it conclude with a criminal sentence of conviction against the witness himself who, moreover, does not become a party in the incidental matter. It is not hard to see how such an expedient, if it could be compatible with the long, cumbersome and costly forms of an archaic procedure, is found to be altogether incompatible with the requirements of dispatch and celerity, and especially of procedural concentration, of a modern procedure. This breaking up of the trial into incidental matters, in which the merits of the evidence are examined before the definitive decision, this anticipation, even if only partial (and perhaps, precisely because partial, all the more unbecoming), of the evaluation of the evidentiary material, is as little in keeping as can be imagined with the principles today accepted by procedural doctrine. Fortunately, in the practice of the ecclesiastical tribunals the r. of the t. (as, indeed, the analogous institution of the r. of the person of the witness) constitutes an institution to which recourse is almost never had. And moreover the instruction of 1 July 1932 of the S. Congreg. of the Sacraments for matrimonial processes, while expressly mentioning the reprobatio personae testium (art. 131), passes over in silence the institution of the reprobatio attestationum. In practice, therefore, after the testimonies have been published, if a party or the defender of the bond or the promoter of justice believe they can and must refute some testimony not in accordance, in their view, with the truth, they ask for a supplementary investigation. The judge normally grants it (unless he finds it irrelevant or already excluded by certain and irrefutable elements) and gathers the requested evidence. Then, at the stage of discussion on the merits, the parties, disputing over the whole body of evidence, will set forth the reasons why a witness is to be considered truthful or false, and the judge, in the reasoning of his sentence, will state on which evidence he bases his decision, without any need for a formal declaration of r. of the attestations. In substance, practice has corrected the excessively formalistic precept of the written law. It is singular, however, that no account has been taken of this practice, correct as it is, in the recent formulation of the Oriental law.

Corrado Bernardini