Opinion ID: 854149
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Construction of the Indiana right in light of its text and underlying purposes

Text: The cardinal principle of constitutional construction [is] that words are to be considered as used in their ordinary sense. Tucker v. State, 218 Ind. 614, 670, 35 N.E.2d 270, 291 (1941). On this first line of inquiry in any constitutional caseconstitutional textthe document is unambiguous for these purposes: No person, in any criminal prosecution, shall be compelled to testify against himself. IND. CONST. art. I, § 14 (emphasis added). The construction Ajabu urges us to adopt would require judicial redefinition of the word compelled to mean something it did not mean when the Indiana Constitution was adopted, and does not mean today. Compare WEBSTER'S NEW WORLD DICTIONARY 284 (3d ed.1988) (defining compel to mean to force or constrain ... to get or bring about by force) with NOAH WEBSTER, AN AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 235 (3d ed. 1856) (defining compelled to mean forced; constrained; obliged). The 1850-51 constitutional debates are bereft of any discussion of this provision and give us no reason to find an unusual usage of these common words. [10] The decisional law as far back as 1860 has focused on the prerequisite of compulsion: [The right] exempts no one from the consequences of a crime which he may have committed, but only from the necessity of himself producing the evidence to establish it. Wilkins v. Malone, 14 Ind. 153, 156 (1860). Stated concisely, our cases establish that there is a right not to be forced to speak, but there is no right to bar a confession freely given after appropriate warnings and waivers. See also Corder v. State, 467 N.E.2d 409, 415 (Ind.1984) (defendant who spoke freely to court-appointed psychiatrists was not denied his rights under Section 14 or the Fifth Amendment); Ross v. State, 204 Ind. 281, 293, 182 N.E. 865, 869 (1932) (The essence of the privilege is freedom from testimonial compulsion.); cf. State ex rel. Keller v. Criminal Court of Marion County, 262 Ind. 420, 428, 317 N.E.2d 433, 438 (1974) (The Fifth Amendment is not a bar to any conviction resting on self-incrimination. It prohibits only compelled self-incrimination.). We recently reiterated that the purpose underlying an Indiana constitutional provision is critical to ascertaining what the particular constitutional provision was designed to prevent. Town of St. John, 675 N.E.2d at 321 (internal quotation marks omitted). In this case, there is no connection between the purpose to be advanced by Article I, Section 14 and the evil Ajabu asks us to proscribe. The treatment of a lawyer whose services and efforts were unknown to Ajabu cannot have affected the voluntariness of his decision to speak with his interrogators about the crimes in this case. This is a critical point. As Justice Brennan declared in holding the federal self-incrimination right applicable to the states in 1964: [T]he constitutional inquiry [under the Fifth Amendment] is not whether the conduct of state officers in obtaining the confession was shocking, but whether the confession was free and voluntary. Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 7, 84 S.Ct. 1489, 1493, 12 L.Ed.2d 653 (1964) (internal quotation marks omitted). Or, as this Court remarked in rejecting a claim that the Indiana constitutional right had been abridged in a 1902 case: Whether [the suspect] should so testify was, therefore, a personal privilege which he could claim or not as he chose. If he gave such criminating [sic] evidence voluntarily, his constitutional rights were not violated. It is a general rule that when a personal privilege exists for a witness to testify or not as he chooses, if he does testify without objection he will be deemed to have done so voluntarily. State v. Comer, 157 Ind. 611, 613, 62 N.E. 452, 453 (1902); see also Ogle v. State, 193 Ind. 187, 127 N.E. 547 (1920) (assertion of right to remain silent during police questioning is personal and may be waived). In sum, the language, textual history, and purpose of Article I, Section 14 of the Indiana Constitution all point to the conclusion that it protects the defendant against use of his compelled testimony, not his voluntary statements. The propriety of the treatment of a third person is extraneous to that analysis.