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UNITED STATES v. BALSYS

Opinion of the Court

based on their fear of prosecution in Sicily, for two reasons.
1 Sim. (N. S.), at 329, 61 Eng. Rep., at 128. The ﬁrst was
the court’s belief that the privilege speaks only to matters
that might be criminal under the laws of England: “The rule
relied on by the Defendants, is one which exists merely by
virtue of our own municipal law, and must, I think, have ref-
erence, exclusively, to matters penal by that law: to matters
as to which, if disclosed, the Judge would be able to say,
as matter of law, whether it could or could not entail penal
consequences.” For the second, the court relied on the un-
likelihood that the defendants would ever leave England and
be subject to Sicilian prosecution.

The Murphy majority nonetheless understood this rule to
have been undermined by the subsequent case of United
States of America v. McRae, 3 L. R. Ch. 79 (1867). See 378
U. S., at 61.
In that suit brought by the United States
against McRae in England to recover funds that he had col-
lected there as a Confederate agent during the Civil War,
the court recognized the privilege based on McRae’s claim
that his testimony would incriminate him in the United
States. The court distinguished the litigation then before it
from King of the Two Sicilies,
indicating that though it
agreed with the general principles stated by Lord Cran-
worth, see 3 L. R. Ch., at 84, he had not needed to lay down
the broad proposition that invocation of the privilege was
appropriate only with regard to matters penal under Eng-
land’s own law, see id., at 85. The court did not say that
the privilege could be invoked in any case involving fear of
prosecution under foreign law, however.
Instead it noted
two distinctions from King of the Two Sicilies, the ﬁrst being
that the “presumed ignorance of the Judge as to foreign law”
on which King of the Two Sicilies rested has been “com-
pletely removed by the admitted statements upon the plead-
ings,” 3 L. R. Ch., at 85; the second being that McRae pre-
sented the unusual circumstance that the party seeking to
compel the testimony, the United States, was also the party