Opinion ID: 744057
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Purposes of the Fifth Amendment

Text: Although the district court noted that the Fifth Amendment has a role in preserving an individual's privacy and dignity, it determined that the fundamental purpose of the privilege [against self-incrimination] is to protect individuals against governmental overreaching. Balsys, 918 F.Supp. at 598-99. The court went on to conclude that, since Balsys asserted the privilege in order to thwart the enforcement of domestic law, and since the government has a valid purpose, and there is no evidence of malicious or  'overzealous prosecution,'  allowing Balsys to assert the privilege would undermine the values the Fifth Amendment was intended to protect. Id. at 599. We disagree. The origins and history of the Fifth Amendment are complex and controversial. See, e.g., Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Fifth Amendment: The Right Against Self-Incrimination (1968); R.H. Helmholz, Origins of the Privilege Against Self-incrimination: The Role of the European Ius Commune, 65 N.Y.U. L.Rev. 962 (1990); John H. Langbein, The Historical Origins of the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination at Common Law, 92 Mich. L.Rev. 1047 (1994); John H. Wigmore, The Privilege Against Self-Crimination; Its History, 15 Harv. L.Rev. 610 (1902). And its purposes are myriad and difficult to divine. See Murphy, 378 U.S. at 56-57 n. 5, 84 S.Ct. at 1597 n. 5; Akhil Reed Amar & Renee B. Lettow, Fifth Amendment First Principles: The Self-Incrimination Clause, 93 Mich. L.Rev. 857, 857-58 (The Self-Incrimination Clause of the Fifth Amendment is an unsolved riddle of vast proportions, a Gordian knot in the middle of our Bill of Rights. From the beginning it lacked an easily identifiable rationale.... Today, things are no better: the clause continues to confound and confuse.). Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has stated that its purposes include: our unwillingness to subject those suspected of crime to the cruel trilemma of self-accusation, perjury or contempt; our preference for an accusatorial rather than an inquisitorial system of criminal justice; our fear that self-incriminating statements will be elicited by inhumane treatment and abuses; our sense of fair play which dictates a fair state-individual balance by requiring the government to leave the individual alone until good cause is shown for disturbing him and by requiring the government in its contest with the individual to shoulder the load; our respect for the inviolability of the human personality and of the right of each individual to a private enclave where he may lead a private life; our distrust of self-deprecatory statements; and our realization that the privilege, while sometimes a shelter to the guilty, is often a protection to the innocent. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 55, 84 S.Ct. at 1596 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). We are told, therefore, that the Fifth Amendment serves three categories of purposes: it advances individual integrity and privacy, it protects against the state's pursuit of its goals by excessive means, and it promotes the systemic values of our method of criminal justice. Rather than attempt to determine a single cardinal purpose of the Fifth Amendment and consider the question before us only in relation to that purpose, as the district court essentially did, we are bound to recognize the multiple values that the Supreme Court has found the privilege against self-incrimination to serve, and to consider whether allowing those who have reasonable fear of foreign prosecution to invoke the privilege promotes or defeats [these] policies and purposes. Id. 4 1. Individual Dignity and Privacy Values Permitting a witness to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating himself in a foreign criminal case works to protect the dignity and privacy of the individual every bit as much as allowing the privilege in cases where the fear is of domestic prosecution. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized the need to avoid imposing the cruel trilemma of self-accusation, perjury, or contempt, see, e.g., Pennsylvania v. Muniz, 496 U.S. 582, 595-97, 110 S.Ct. 2638, 2646-47, 110 L.Ed.2d 528 (1990); South Dakota v. Neville, 459 U.S. 553, 561-64, 103 S.Ct. 916, 921-22, 74 L.Ed.2d 748 (1983), and this trilemma is no less cruel nor any less imposed by a government within the United States merely because the testimony is ultimately used by a foreign nation. Nor is the threat to the the human personality and privacy any less serious simply because the compulsion serves the purposes of a foreign government. Finally, the privilege protects the innocent and better ensures the reliability of the testimony the United States seeks to compel regardless of whether the witness from whom the information is sought fears foreign or domestic prosecution, since self-incriminating statements are no more reliable in either case. 2. Values of the American Criminal Justice System 1 The systemic policies of American criminal justice that underly the Fifth Amendment are neither promoted nor inhibited by allowing the privilege to be invoked in cases of fear of foreign prosecution. Although we value an accusatorial system, a fair state-individual balance in criminal trials, and trial evidence of the highest reliability, our practice of these values is unaffected one way or the other when a witness fears foreign prosecution. This factor is, therefore, of no real significance in cases of this sort. 2 3. Values of Preventing Governmental Overreaching 3 The question of how applying the privilege in cases of fear of foreign prosecution affects the Fifth Amendment's purpose of avoiding governmental overreaching is more complicated. The district court reasoned that since Balsys faces no domestic prosecution, there is no incentive for the government to elicit self-incriminating statements from Balsys by 'inhumane treatment and abuses.'  Balsys, 918 F.Supp. at 599 (quoting Murphy, 378 U.S. at 55, 84 S.Ct. at 1596). Admittedly, there is less of a motive for a government to treat a witness inhumanely in order to extract admissions when that same government is not seeking to prosecute the witness. Conviction hunger 5 seems unlikely when the prosecution does not intend to eat. We believe, however, that the district court underestimated the danger that exists where the fear is of prosecution in foreign lands. 4 First, a domestic government's interest in extracting admissions in aid of foreign prosecutions is more analogous to a domestic jurisdiction's interest in the criminal prosecution of a witness by another domestic jurisdiction than it is to the situation in which the extracting government has no interest in prosecution at all. In Murphy, the Court suggested that the purpose of avoiding governmental abuse was best served by preventing states and the federal government from compelling testimony that might incriminate the witness in a court of another jurisdiction. This is because there is frequently a cooperative federalism between the several states and the nation, as a result of which the federal and state governments wage a united front against many types of criminal activity. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 56, 84 S.Ct. at 1597. 5 International collaboration in criminal prosecutions has intensified admirably in recent years. See New MLAT Treaties Increase DOJ's Reach, 4 No. 7 DOJ Alert 7, April 18, 1994, (discussing rise in United States cooperation with foreign nations to produce criminal evidence); Ethan A. Nadelman, Cops Across Borders: the Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement (1993); M. Cherif Bassiouni, Policy Considerations on Inter-State Cooperation in Criminal Matters, 4 Pace Y.B. Int'l L. 123, 130 (1992) (discussing the increase in cooperation among national and international police agencies since 1960's); Dominic Bencivenga, International Antitrust Bilateral Pacts Seen As Crucial to Enforcement, N.Y.L.J, December 12, 1996 at 5; U.S. Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties Continue Proliferating, Money Laundering Alert, 1996 WL 8687221 (May 1, 1996); Bruce Zagaris, International Criminal and Enforcement Cooperation in the Americas in the Wake of Integration, 3 Sw. J.L. & Trade Am. 1 (1996) (reviewing criminal enforcement cooperation mechanisms in the Americas). And what might be called cooperative internationalism has now begun to parallel the cooperative federalism described in Murphy. This eminently desirable development leads to the conclusion that, since the United States does have a significant stake in many foreign criminal cases, we can best avoid governmental abuse by allowing witnesses to avoid being compelled to answer questions posed by the government at home for fear of incriminating themselves abroad. 6 Second, as this case demonstrates, there is considerable correlation between the cases in which a witness is most likely to be able to demonstrate a real and substantial fear of foreign prosecution and the cases in which the purpose of preventing government overreaching would best be served by permitting the privilege. The United States government has manifested a substantial interest in the success of Balsys's foreign prosecution, an interest that makes that foreign prosecution significantly more likely. For example, according to the district court--and neither party has challenged its analysis in this regard--Balsys has a real and substantial fear of foreign prosecution in large part precisely because (1) OSI was created for the sole purpose of investigating and gathering evidence of alleged Nazi collaborators residing in the United States illegally, and taking legal action to denaturalize, deport or prosecute them, (2) OSI has entered into an agreement to provide evidence that it has gathered on suspected Nazi collaborators to Lithuania, and (3) OSI has exchanged incriminating evidence on suspected Nazi collaborators with Israel on past occasions. See Balsys, 918 F.Supp. at 595-97 (citing the order of the Attorney General establishing OSI, Order of Att'y Gen. No. 851-79 (Sept. 4, 1979), and a Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States Department of Justice and the Office of the Procurator General of the Republic of Lithuania Concerning Cooperation in the Pursuit of War Criminals, August 3, 1992, U.S.--Lithuania); see also Gecas, 50 F.3d at 1557-61 (concluding that Gecas had a real and substantial fear of foreign prosecution for substantially the same reasons). 7 In the presence of such facts, it would be odd indeed to suggest that the United States government does not care about foreign prosecutions and hence that allowing witnesses to invoke the privilege does not discourage governmental overreaching. Indeed, it is precisely in cases in which the United States' interest is strongest that the evidence will most probably be shared. In the same cases, in part because of the sharing of evidence, the witness will most likely be able to show a real fear of foreign prosecution. There is thus a strong correlation between the cases in which the government has an interest and the cases in which the witness will be able to use the privilege. It follows that permitting the privilege in such cases will help curb any tendency by the United States to take abusive measures just as it does in cases in which domestic prosecution is feared. For these reasons, we reject the district court's argument that allowing Balsys the privilege would not further the Fifth Amendment purpose of avoiding governmental overreaching. 8 The district court also erred when, following Lileikis it suggested that it is relevant to the application of the privilege that [t]here is no indication that the government's motive is malicious, or that the government is engaging in overzealous prosecution. Balsys, 918 F.Supp. at 599. The Lileikis court held that as long as the United States has a legitimate need for a witness's testimony to further a governmental interest in enforcing domestic law, and there is no evidence of improper motivation, the privilege must yield. Lileikis, 899 F.Supp. at 808-09. This holding, however, is contrary to both the purposes and the structure of the protection provided by the Fifth Amendment. 9 The exact same argument--if it were valid--would apply to invocations of the privilege in cases of fear of domestic prosecution. In almost all situations in which a witness in a civil proceeding claims the privilege, there exists a significant domestic law interest in obtaining the information. And yet the privilege perdures. Similarly, it is rare in such cases that one can show either overzealous prosecution or improper motivation. But no such showing is required. The privilege applies in such instances because the Fifth Amendment is fundamentally preventative. It prevents the government from using compelled testimony in the class of the cases--criminal prosecutions--in which the government's interest in the information might most tempt it to abuse witnesses. It does this at the cost of possibly limiting information gathering in other contexts, including civil cases. The point of the privilege is to preempt government abuse, rather than to seek to deter abuse by punishing it after it has occurred. 10 The question is not, therefore, as Lileikis suggests, whether the government can state some legitimate interest in the testimony it seeks, or whether governmental overreaching can be shown. It is rather whether cases involving fear of foreign prosecution--as a class--involve circumstances in which the application of the Fifth Amendment would preempt abuse and thereby promote constitutional goals. More directly, the question is whether, in this respect, cases involving fear of foreign prosecution differ significantly from cases involving domestic prosecutions. As we have noted, the United States will frequently have the same opportunity and the same temptations when a witness faces prosecution abroad as in cases involving fear of prosecution by another domestic jurisdiction. It follows that applying the privilege in both sets of cases achieves the same functions at the same costs. In both contexts, the Fifth Amendment inhibits the pursuit of government goals--in spite of their legitimacy and importance--in order to deny the government an inducement to use inappropriate methods to achieve those ends. 11