Interesting Psak: State Witnesses are evil and invalid as witnesses

Many people seem to be upset with the State's Prosecutor office for deciding to indict Netanyahu on various crimes such as breach of trust and bribery. I am not sure why everyone gets so worked up when it is Netanyahu in the hot seat and all the little people who have been indicted over the years and convicted of crimes have no right to talk about how the system screwed them because that is undermining the justice system. Netanyahu and his cronies claim corruption, but are they also claiming that everyone currently in jail was railroaded and should be let out or only him? Do all his political backers fighting the injustice also say that the Prosecutors have railroaded everyone else, or is only Netanyahu being railroaded?

Kikar is reporting that Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef has paskened in his weekly Saturday night shiur that one who becomes a State witness to testify against someone else is an evil person and becomes passul from testifying in beis din or at weddings and such.

Rav Yosef says that people should be careful to only adjudicate their issues under the auspices of a beis din and not in secular courts. Besides for the other issues wrong with the secular courts, such as using relatives as witnesses which is no good and the judges not knowing the Shulchan Aruch or the halachos of testimony or court proceedings, they also use state witnesses, which is completely against halacha. If he was part of what happened, he too is a rasha and cannot be a witness.

The truth is, Rav Yosef is only talking about this now because of Netanyahu. He has said this before, as have other members of his family, and this statement is nothing new. In 2018 Rav Yitzchak Yosef himself spoke about judges and lawyers in the secular court system being invalid witnesses. In 2012 Rav Ovadia Yosef, his father, spoke about the same issue. In 2010 his brother Rav Avraham Yosef, then Chief Rabbi of Holon, spoke about this as well. The only difference is that now he singled out the state's witness rather than just talking about the judges and lawyers, but that is just another aspect of the process that he already invalidated.

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