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680

UNITED STATES v. BALSYS

Opinion of the Court

Bank were later, of course, superseded by Murdock with
its unequivocal holding that prosecution in a state jurisdic-
tion not bound by the Clause is beyond the purview of the
privilege.

C

In 1964, our precedent took a turn away from the unquali-
ﬁed proposition that fear of prosecution outside the jurisdic-
tion seeking to compel testimony did not implicate a Fifth or
In
Fourteenth Amendment privilege, as the case might be.
Murphy v. Waterfront Comm’n of N. Y. Harbor, 378 U. S.
52 (1964), we reconsidered the converse of the situation in
Murdock, whether a witness in a state proceeding who had
been granted immunity from state prosecution could invoke
the privilege based on fear of prosecution on federal charges.
In the course of enquiring into a work stoppage at several
New Jersey piers, the Waterfront Commission of New York
Harbor subpoenaed the defendants, who were given immu-
nity from prosecution under the laws of New Jersey and New
York. When the witnesses persisted in refusing to testify
based on their fear of federal prosecution, they were held in
civil contempt, and the order was afﬁrmed by New Jersey’s
highest court.
In re Application of the Waterfront Comm’n
of N. Y. Harbor, 39 N. J. 436, 449, 189 A. 2d 36, 44 (1963).
This Court held the defendants could be forced to testify
not because fear of federal prosecution was irrelevant but
because the Self-Incrimination Clause barred the National
Government from using their state testimony or its fruits to
obtain a federal conviction. We explained that “the consti-
tutional privilege against self-incrimination protects a state
witness against incrimination under federal as well as state
law and a federal witness against incrimination under state
as well as federal law.”

378 U. S., at 77–78.

Murphy is a case invested with two alternative rationales.
Under the ﬁrst, the result reached in Murphy was undoubt-
edly correct, given the decision rendered that very same day
in Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U. S. 1 (1964), which applied the