Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 726.0

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Unit: $U97

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

681

Opinion of the Court

doctrine of Fourteenth Amendment due process incorpora-
tion to the Self-Incrimination Clause, so as to bind the States
as well as the National Government to recognize the privi-
lege.
Id., at 3. Prior to Malloy, the Court had refused to
impose the privilege against self-incrimination against the
States through the Fourteenth Amendment, see Twining v.
New Jersey, 211 U. S. 78 (1908), thus leaving state-court wit-
nesses seeking exemption from compulsion to testify to their
rights under state law, as supplemented by the Fourteenth
Amendment’s limitations on coerced confessions. Malloy,
however, established that “[t]he Fourteenth Amendment se-
cures against state invasion the same privilege that the Fifth
Amendment guarantees against federal infringement—the
right of a person to remain silent unless he chooses to speak
in the unfettered exercise of his own will, and to suffer no
penalty . . . for such silence.”

378 U. S., at 8.

As the Court immediately thereafter said in Murphy, Mal-
loy “necessitate[d] a reconsideration” of the unqualiﬁed Mur-
dock rule that a witness subject to testimonial compulsion
in one jurisdiction, state or federal, could not plead fear of
378 U. S., at 57. After Malloy,
prosecution in the other.
the Fifth Amendment limitation could no longer be seen as
framed for one jurisdiction alone, each jurisdiction having
instead become subject to the same claim of privilege ﬂowing
from the one limitation. Since fear of prosecution in the one
jurisdiction bound by the Clause now implicated the very
privilege binding upon the other, the Murphy opinion sensi-
bly 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 constitutional privilege against self-incrimination
is applicable to each.”
378 U. S., at 55 (internal quotation
marks omitted).7 The whipsawing was possible owing to a

7 Prior to Murphy, such “whipsawing” efforts had been permissible, but
arguably less outrageous since, as the opinion notes, “either the ‘compel-
ling’ government or the ‘using’ government [was] a State, and, until today,