Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for a unanimous Court that responses to questions made under oath that relayed truthful information in and of themselves but were intended to mislead or evade the examiner could not be prosecuted.

It would later be discovered that Bronston personally had had an account with International Credit Bank in Geneva, on which he made deposits and drew checks totalling up to $180,000 during the five years in which the company was active and closed just before the bankruptcy filing.

While he conceded that Bronston's answer may have been intended to mislead,[6] Burger felt it would be going far beyond Congress's intent to apply the statute that broadly.

Such an application also conflicted with the literal wording of the law, which defined perjury as willfully stating under oath any material matter which the witness does not believe to be true.

"But we are not dealing with casual conversation and the statute does not make it a criminal act for a witness to willfully state any material matter that implies any material matter that he does not believe to be true" since intent to mislead or evade might not be the underlying reason: "Under the pressures and tensions of interrogation, it is not uncommon for the most earnest witnesses to give answers that are not entirely responsive.

"[9] The trial jury's finding that Bronston had intended to mislead was of no consequence, and indeed should not have been a determination they were allowed to make: A jury should not be permitted to engage in conjecture whether an unresponsive answer, true and complete on its face, was intended to mislead or divert the examiner; the state of mind of the witness is relevant only to the extent that it bears on whether "he does not believe [his answer] to be true."

[15] Criticisms have ranged from prosecutors upset at the limitations it placed on their ability to use the threat of perjury prosecution to compel truthful testimony from hostile witnesses to a Wake Forest professor who cites it as among many aspects of the legal system that have caused a general decline in morality when they became broadly applied outside of the practice of law.

[17] The case came to the fore in 1998, when Bill Clinton's attorneys invoked it as a defense to perjury charges brought by the House of Representatives during his impeachment.

[18] They argued that lawyers for Paula Jones had failed to follow up on questions asking Clinton generally if he had ever been alone with Monica Lewinsky to which he had answered "I don't recall".

[18] In response, House impeachment manager Steve Chabot called the resort to Bronston "the cornerstone of the president's defense" and a "legal smokescreen", when presenting the case to the Senate.

They erred, he said, in coming up with their own definition of sexual relations, which allowed Clinton to look for ambiguities and then take advantage of them on the stand.

Two such cases that reached the federal appeals courts gave rise to such hopes (or fears) with regard to Bronston, but neither made it past that level.

The Eighth Circuit upheld his conviction five years later on the grounds that "[a]bsent fundamental ambiguity or impreciseness in the questioning, the meaning and truthfulness of the declarant's answer is for the jury.

Key to the case was a 1990 Preakness Day party attended by Robert DeZarn, later made adjutant general by Brereton Jones after the latter was elected governor.

After the report, another Guard officer came to Tripp and his colleagues with new information which did substantiate some of the allegations, and revealed to them DeZarn's role in the 1990 party.

He repeated this defense at trial, while prosecutors introduced Louisville Courier-Journal articles showing that he knew very well which party investigators were concerned about.

DeZarn had also attempted to argue Robbins wasn't relevant, since in that case the defendant had introduced the mistake, but Judge Rosen noted that fact played no role in the verdict there.

Commentators have either hailed Dezarn as "nudg[ing] federal criminal law closer to everyday morality"[13] or decrying it as requiring witnesses to guess what a questioner really means.

"The DeZarn decision appears to place the witness at risk — if he or she subjectively misinterprets the state of mind of the interrogator and gives a literally true answer", wrote Barry Tarlow.