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Cite as: 524 U. S. 666 (1998)

667

Syllabus

the possibility of foreign prosecution as a premise for claiming the privi-
lege. Pp. 672–674.

(c) In the precursors of this case, the Court concluded that prosecu-
tion in a state jurisdiction not bound by the Self-Incrimination Clause
is beyond the purview of the privilege. United States v. Murdock, 284
U. S. 141. United States v. Saline Bank of Va., 1 Pet. 100, and Ball-
mann v. Fagin, 200 U. S. 186, distinguished. The Court’s precedent
turned away from this proposition once, in Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U. S.
1, 3, where it applied the Fourteenth Amendment due process incorpora-
tion to the Self-Incrimination Clause, so as to bind the States as well as
It immediately said, in Murphy
the National Government by its terms.
v. Waterfront Comm’n of N. Y. Harbor, 378 U. S. 52, 57, that Malloy
necessitated a reconsideration of Murdock’s rule. After Malloy, the
Fifth Amendment limitation was no longer framed for one jurisdiction
alone, each jurisdiction having instead become subject to the same privi-
lege claim ﬂowing from the same source. Since fear of prosecution in
the one jurisdiction now implicated the very privilege binding upon the
other, the Murphy opinion sensibly recognized that if a witness could
not assert the privilege in such circumstances, the witness could be
“whipsawed” into incriminating himself under both state and federal
law, even though the privilege was applicable to each. Such whipsaw-
ing is possible because the privilege against self-incrimination can be
exchanged by the government for an immunity to prosecutorial use of
any compelled inculpatory testimony. Kastigar v. United States, 406
U. S. 441, 448–449. Such an exchange by the government is permissible
only when it provides immunity as broad as the privilege. After Mal-
loy had held the privilege binding on the state jurisdictions as well
as the National Government, it would have been intolerable to allow a
prosecutor in one or the other jurisdiction to eliminate the privilege by
offering immunity less complete than the privilege’s dual jurisdictional
reach. To the extent that the Murphy Court undercut Murdock’s ra-
tionale on historical grounds, its reasoning that English cases supported
a more expansive reading of the Clause is ﬂawed and cannot be accepted
now. Pp. 674–690.

(d) Murphy discusses a catalog of “Policies of the Privilege,” which
could suggest a concern broad enough to encompass foreign prose-
cutions. However, the adoption of such a revised theory would rest on
Murphy’s treatment of English cases, which has been rejected as an
indication of the Clause’s meaning. Moreover, although Murphy cata-
logs aspirations furthered by the Clause, its discussion does not weigh
the host of competing policy concerns that would be raised in a le-
gitimate reconsideration of the Clause’s scope. Contrary to Balsys’s