Mr. King,
With all due respect, I think you've answered your own question. Obviously, it is in the spirit of the court for parties to be fully forthcoming, honest and responsive, no matter whether the subject of questioning be relevant or irrelevant. However, it is also realized that criminal prosecution for such failure should only be reserved for the most egregious of instances, that being when the untruth is directly relevant to the matter at hand. For the former instance, mere civil sanctions are sufficient. And in the case with President Clinton, such action was indeed taken as you have pointed out. But if we were to criminally prosecute for every little mistruth, ommission and lie no matter how irrelevant, our court system would literally be overburdened by the massive caseload. That and fundamental due process is why perjury is only reserved for relevant falsehoods under oath.
As for the issue of relevancy during discovery--neither depositions nor interrogatories are conducted in the presence of a judge. A lawyer may object to a line of questioning as being irrelevant or soliciting hearsay testimony, but except in cases of attorney-client privilege, the deponent still must answer. Discovery is not any sort of a "mini-trial" as it merely is a fact finding process for the parties to sort through so they can present the relevant evidence at trial. Going to trial generally sorts out what is and what is not relevant. Now here, Jones v. Clinton never went to trial, which makes proving perjury more difficult because there is no final outcome (i.e. acquital or conviction) one can point to as being affected by any mistruth. This isn't to say you couldn't bring perjury in an instance where a case never goes to trial, but you still have to ask but-for the false testimony would it have impacted the matter at hand. Here, but-for President Clinton falesly denying his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, would it have affected Ms. Jones' presentation of the facts of what she alleged occurred at the Excelsior Hotel that night? And in the end, it's a major stretch to say that it would--you are looking at a consensual relationship as opposed to an alleged non-consensual act of proposition, and there's very few, if any, lines to be drawn between the two.
I think in the end the weakness of the perjury case showed. I think neither President Clinton nor Mr. Ray (Ken Starr's successor in the OIC) wanted to lose face but both also realized the reality of the situation. So the agreement not to prosecute (which is different than a plea bargain, by the way) was entered into. No matter if he even thought he had a strong chance of accquital, President Clinton probably did not want to have to go through what he had to go through in all of 1998 and part of 1999 and was willing to do without his law license for five years. While the OIC was still being pressured to press criminal perjury charges by conservatives who somehow thought President Clinton "got away with it" during the impeachment process, I think Mr. Ray knew the case for perjury was extremely tenuous at best, that the prior impeachment charges of perjury had ended in acquittal (by the way, with a much more lienient standard of guilt than what is assigned at the criminal level), and it most likely would have ended up being a waste of time and money. In the end, both Clinton and Ray got to essentially wash their hands of the matter and put it to bed. Clinton did not have to sit through further embarassing testimony regarding his private life, and Ray got to throw a bone to the conservatives riding his back, that he got Clinton's law license suspended.
him as a matter of course.