Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 749.0

524US2

Unit: $U97

[09-06-00 19:37:28] PAGES PGT: OPIN

704

UNITED STATES v. BALSYS

Breyer, J., dissenting

matter of law, that the privilege applies, across jurisdictions,
to the entire class of cases involving federal witnesses who
fear state prosecutions and also to the entire class of cases
involving state witnesses who fear federal prosecutions.
See Murphy, supra, at 77–78. Thus, the Fifth Amend-
ment (or the Fourteenth Amendment) automatically pro-
hibits compelled testimony in any such cross-jurisdictional
circumstance.

If I am right about how Murphy should be understood,
then that case directs the application of the privilege in this
one. That is because the only difference between Murphy
and this case is that one cannot say, as a matter of law, that
every threat of a foreign prosecution is a reasonable threat.
But where there is such a reasonable threat—where the
threat is “real and substantial,” Zicarelli v. New Jersey
Comm’n of Investigation, 406 U. S. 472, 478 (1972)—the priv-
ilege, as Murphy understands it, would apply.

A

The majority says that one can read Murphy as embody-
ing a very different rationale, a rationale that turns upon
considerations of federalism—the need to consider “state and
federal jurisdictions . . . as one” for purposes of applying the
privilege. Ante, at 683.
It reads Murphy as a case that
sees at the heart of the Clause

“the principle that the courts of a government from
which a witness may reasonably fear prosecution may
not in fairness compel the witness to furnish testimonial
evidence that may be used to prove his guilt.” Ante, at
683 (emphasis added).

It is these
I have underscored the key words “from which.”
words that tie the Clause to prosecutions by the same
sovereign.

But what is the evidence that Murphy put any legal
weight at all upon those underscored words? What reason