Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 140

529US1

Unit: $U34

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

Cite as: 529 U. S. 61 (2000)

65

Opinion of the Court

ment right to due process. The District Court denied the
petition in an unpublished order. A divided panel of the
Second Circuit reversed, holding that the prosecutor’s com-
ments violated respondent’s Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth
Amendment rights. 117 F. 3d 696 (1997), rehearing denied,
159 F. 3d 98 (1998). We granted certiorari. 526 U. S. 1016
(1999).

II

Respondent contends that the prosecutor’s comments on
his presence and on the ability to fabricate that it afforded
him unlawfully burdened his Sixth Amendment right to be
present at trial and to be confronted with the witnesses
against him, see Illinois v. Allen, 397 U. S. 337 (1970);
Pointer v. Texas, 380 U. S. 400 (1965), and his Fifth and Sixth
Amendment rights to testify on his own behalf, see Rock v.
Arkansas, 483 U. S. 44 (1987). Attaching the cost of im-
peachment to the exercise of these rights was, he asserts,
unconstitutional.

Respondent’s argument boils down to a request that we
extend to comments of the type the prosecutor made here
the rationale of Grifﬁn v. California, 380 U. S. 609 (1965),
which involved comments upon a defendant’s refusal to tes-
tify.
In that case, the trial court instructed the jury that it
was free to take the defendant’s failure to deny or explain
facts within his knowledge as tending to indicate the truth
of the prosecution’s case. This Court held that such a com-
ment, by “solemniz[ing] the silence of the accused into evi-
dence against him,” unconstitutionally “cuts down on the
privilege [against self-incrimination] by making its assertion
costly.”

Id., at 614.

We decline to extend Grifﬁn to the present context. As
an initial matter, respondent’s claims have no historical foun-
dation, neither in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was adopted,
nor in 1868 when, according to our jurisprudence, the Four-
teenth Amendment extended the strictures of the Fifth and
Sixth Amendments to the States. The process by which