A Sworn False Statement Made During a Trial is "Material" If It Is Merely Capable of Influencing the Decision Maker.

State v. Burnett, Minn.Ct.App., 7/20/2015.  Mr. Burnett testified during his trial on four counts of criminal sexual conduct.  Mr. Burnett denied any sexual conduct; and in doing so he claimed to have served four and a half "proud years" in the U.S. Army, which included overseas deployment, serious injury, receipt of two Purple Hearts and a medical discharge.  The jury was unable to reach a verdict.

In between the first trial and the second trial the state found out that all that stuff about military service was untrue.  Mr. Burnett did not testify at the second trial and a jury convicted him of three of the four counts.  At his sentencing hearing Mr. Burnett admitted that he had lied about his military service.

Thereafter the state charged Mr. Burnett with felony perjury, perhaps because it saw causation between the presence and absence of the false claims:  hung jury then conviction. The perjury statute requires the state to prove that Mr. Burnett had made a false statement that was "material" during his testimony in the first trial.

So, what's a "material" statement?  The perjury statute, Minn.Stat. 609.48, doesn't say.  What the statute does say is that it makes no difference that the declarant didn't know that the statement was material or believed it to be immaterial.  The statute also says that it doesn't matter whether the statement "affect[ed] the proceeding for which it was made."  Worth noting is that at least according to the jury instructions, JIG 22.02, "materiality" is a question of law:

You are instructed, as a matter of law, that if the statements were made, they were material.

With neither statutes nor state court opinions providing a definition of "material" the court of appeals looks not to the appellate court's favorite source of law - the dictionary - but to the U.S. Supreme Court.  (There are two dictionary definitions that are pertinent: "important, essential, relevant" or "significant, influential, or relevant, especially to the extent of determining a cause or affecting a judgment.") No matter. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that a false statement is "material" if it has "a natural tendency to influence, or [is] capable of influencing, the decision of the decision-making body to which it was addressed." Neder v. United States, 527 U.S. 1 (1999). Other federal court have made similar pronouncements on the definition of materiality.  The court of appeals adopts the Neder definition.  If Mr. Burnett's false statements of exemplary military service were capable of influencing the jury's verdicts in the criminal sexual conduct trial then those statements were "material." The dictionary's influence in fact gets replaced with the law's influence by conjecture.

And the court concludes that, indeed, Mr. Burnett's false statements about his military service were so capable.  The court agreed with the trial court that Mr. Burnett's false statements about his military service went to the issue of his credibility and were capable of influencing the jury's decision of who to believe -and thus its verdict - him or the victim (who was only six years old).