Opinion ID: 501762
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: introduction

Text: 1 The fifth amendment guarantees ... the right of a person to remain silent unless he chooses to speak in the unfettered expression of his own will, and to suffer no penalty ... for such silence. Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 8, 84 S.Ct. 1489, 1493-94, 12 L.Ed.2d 653 (1964). In Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, 86 S.Ct. 1826, 16 L.Ed.2d 908 (1966), the United States Supreme Court ruled that the fifth amendment protects an accused only from being compelled to testify against himself or otherwise provide the state with evidence of a testimonial or communicative nature. The Court then concluded that, because the results of a blood alcohol breathalyzer test are physical rather than testimonial or communicative evidence, a state has the power to administer such a test against a defendant's will without infringing on his fifth amendment privilege. 2 More recently in South Dakota v. Neville, 459 U.S. 553, 103 S.Ct. 916, 74 L.Ed.2d 748 (1983) the Court addressed a question reserved in Schmerber, that is, whether, in order to prove a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol, the admission into evidence of a defendant's refusal to submit to a breathalyzer test violated his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. The court reasoned that because it gave him the choice of submitting to the test or refusing, the state did not directly compel the defendant to refuse the test. Id. at 562-64, 103 S.Ct. at 922-23. 1 The choice between submitting to a blood test which legitimately could have been compelled under Schmerber, or, alternatively, having the refusal used as evidence in court, was not so coercive as to amount to compulsion in violation of the fifth amendment. Id. at 563-64, 103 S.Ct. at 922-23. The fact that refusal was accompanied by the civil penalty of license revocation did not affect the Court's conclusion. Id. at 563, 103 S.Ct. at 922. 3 The case before us goes one step further. We are presented with the novel question of the application of the Neville rationale to the unusual situation in which a state has made refusal to submit to a breathalyzer test a separate criminal offense, itself punishable by a minimum sentence of three days in jail. Whether such use of a refusal to take a test for intoxication violates the fifth amendment's guarantee against self incrimination is a question of first impression in this circuit, and apparently has been addressed by no other federal court. 2