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529US1

Unit: $U34

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PORTUONDO v. AGARD

Opinion of the Court

III

Finally, we address the Second Circuit’s holding that the
prosecutor’s comments violated respondent’s Fourteenth
Amendment right to due process. Of course to the extent
this claim is based upon alleged burdening of Fifth and Sixth
Amendment rights, it has already been disposed of by our
determination that those Amendments were not infringed.
Cf. Graham v. Connor, 490 U. S. 386, 395 (1989) (where an
Amendment “provides an explicit textual source of constitu-
tional protection . . . that Amendment, not the more general-
ized notion of ‘substantive due process,’ must be the guide
for analyzing [the] claims”).

Respondent contends, however, that because New York
law required him to be present at his trial, see N. Y. Crim.
Proc. Law § 260.20 (McKinney 1993); N. Y. Crim. Proc. Law
§ 340.50 (McKinney 1994), the prosecution violated his right
to due process by commenting on that presence. He asserts
that our decision in Doyle v. Ohio, 426 U. S. 610 (1976), re-
quires such a holding.
In Doyle, the defendants, after being
arrested for selling marijuana, received their Miranda warn-
ings and chose to remain silent. At their trials, both took
the stand and claimed that they had not sold marijuana, but
had been “framed.”
426 U. S., at 613. To impeach the de-
fendants, the prosecutors asked each why he had not related
this version of events at the time he was arrested. We held
that this violated the defendants’ rights to due process be-
cause the Miranda warnings contained an implicit “assur-
426 U. S., at 618.
ance that silence will carry no penalty.”
Although there might be reason to reconsider Doyle, we
need not do so here.
“[W]e have consistently explained
Doyle as a case where the government had induced silence
by implicitly assuring the defendant that his silence would
not be used against him.” Fletcher v. Weir, 455 U. S. 603,
606 (1982) (per curiam). The Miranda warnings had, after
all, speciﬁcally given the defendant both the option of speak-
ing and the option of remaining silent—and had then gone