Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 147.0

529US1

Unit: $U34

[09-26-01 08:14:00] PAGES PGT: OPIN

72

PORTUONDO v. AGARD

Opinion of the Court

leaving the defense no opportunity to reply. 117 F. 3d, at
708, and n. 6. That this is not a constitutionally signiﬁcant
distinction is demonstrated by our decision in Reagan.
There the challenged instruction came at the end of the case,
after the defense had rested, just as the prosecutor’s com-
ments did here.3

Our trial structure, which requires the defense to close
before the prosecution, regularly forces the defense to pre-
Indeed, defense counsel
dict what the prosecution will say.
in this case explained to the jury that it was his job in “clos-
ing argument here to try and anticipate as best [he could]
some of the arguments that the prosecution [would] be
making.” App. 25–27. What Reagan permitted—a generic

3 The dissent maintains that Reagan v. United States, 157 U. S. 301
(1895), is inapposite to the question presented in this case because it con-
sidered the effect of an interested-witness instruction on a defendant’s
statutory right to testify, rather than on his constitutional right to testify.
See id., at 304 (citing Act of Mar. 16, 1878, ch. 37, 20 Stat. 30, as amended,
18 U. S. C. § 3481). That is a curious position for the dissent to take.
Grifﬁn—the case the dissent claims controls the outcome here—relied al-
most exclusively on the very statute at issue in Reagan in deﬁning the
contours of the Fifth Amendment right prohibiting comment on the failure
to testify. After quoting the Court’s description, in an earlier case, of the
reasons for the statutory right, see Wilson v. United States, 149 U. S.
60 (1893), the Grifﬁn Court said: “If the words ‘Fifth Amendment’ are
substituted for ‘act’ and for ‘statute,’ the spirit of the Self-Incrimination
Clause is reﬂected.”
It is eminently reasonable to
consider that a questionable manner of constitutional exegesis, see Mitch-
ell v. United States, 526 U. S. 314, 336 (1999) (Scalia, J., dissenting); it is
not reasonable to make Grifﬁn the very centerpiece of one’s case while
simultaneously denying that the statute construed in Reagan (and Grifﬁn)
has anything to do with the meaning of the Constitution. The interpreta-
tion of the statute in Reagan is in fact a much more plausible indication
of constitutional understanding than the application of the statute in Grif-
ﬁn: The Constitution must have allowed what Reagan said the statute
permitted, because otherwise the Court would have been interpreting the
statute in a manner that rendered it void. Grifﬁn, on the other hand,
relied upon the much shakier proposition that a practice which the statute
prohibited must be prohibited by the Constitution as well.

380 U. S., at 613–614.