Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 159.0

529US1

Unit: $U34

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

84

PORTUONDO v. AGARD

Ginsburg, J., dissenting

I do not comprehend why the Court ﬁnds in this account
any demonstration that the prosecutorial comment at issue
here has a long history of unchallenged use.
If prosecutors
in times past had no need to make generic tailoring argu-
ments, it is likely such arguments simply were not made.
Notably, the Court calls up no instance of an 18th- or 19th-
century prosecutor’s urging that a defendant’s presence at
trial facilitated tailored testimony. And if prosecutors did
not make such arguments, courts had no occasion to rule
them out of order. The absence of old cases prohibiting the
comment that the Court now confronts thus scarcely indi-
cates that generic accusations of tailoring have long been
considered constitutional.

The Court’s discussion of Grifﬁn is equally unconvincing.
The Court posits that a ban on inviting juries to draw ad-
verse inferences from a defendant’s silence differs materially
from a ban on inviting juries to draw adverse inferences from
a defendant’s presence, because the inference from silence “is
not . . . ‘natural or irresistible.’ ” See ante, at 67 (quoting
Grifﬁn, 380 U. S., at 615) (emphasis added by majority).
It fails to convey what the
This is a startling statement.
Court actually said in Grifﬁn, which was that the inference
from silence to guilt is “not always so natural or irresistible.”
See ibid. (emphasis added). The statement that an infer-
ence is not always natural or irresistible implies that the
inference is indeed natural or irresistible in many, perhaps
most, cases. And so it is. See Mitchell v. United States,
526 U. S. 314, 332 (1999) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (The Grifﬁn
rule “runs exactly counter to normal evidentiary inferences:
If I ask my son whether he saw a movie I had forbidden him
to watch, and he remains silent, the import of his silence is
clear.”); Lakeside v. Oregon, 435 U. S. 333, 340 (1978) (It is
“very doubtful” that jurors, left to their own devices, would
not draw adverse inferences from a defendant’s failure to tes-
tify.).
It is precisely because the inference is often natural
(but nonetheless prohibited) that the jury, if a defendant so