Court Opinion

ID: 9428217
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:23:10.052005+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:12.331432
License: Public Domain

Justice Powell,
concurring.
Although joining the opinion of the Court, I write briefly to make clear that, for me, this result is required by precedent, not by what I think the Constitution should require.
The Fifth Amendment, applicable to the States through the Fourteenth, provides that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” The question in Griffin v. California, 380 U. S. 609 (1965), was whether this proscription was violated if jurors were told that they could draw inferences from a defendant’s failure to testify. The Court held that neither the judge nor the prosecutor could suggest that jurors draw such inferences. *306A defendant who chooses not to testify hardly can claim that he was compelled to testify. The Court also held, nevertheless, that any “penalty imposed by courts for exercising [this] constitutional privilege” cannot be tolerated because “[i]t cuts down on the privilege by making its assertion costly.” Id., at 614.
Justice Stewart’s dissenting opinion in Griffin, in which Justice White joined, responded persuasively to this departure from the language and purpose of the Self-Incrimination Clause. Justice Stewart wrote:
“We must determine whether the petitioner has been ‘compelled ... to be a witness against himself.’ Compulsion is the focus of the inquiry. Certainly, if any compulsion be detected in the California procedure, it is of a dramatically different and less palpable nature than that involved in the procedures which historically gave rise to the Fifth Amendment guarantee. . . .
“I think that the Court in this case stretches the concept of compulsion beyond all reasonable bounds, and that whatever compulsion may exist derives from the defendant’s choice not to testify, not from any comment by court or counsel. . . . [T]he jury will, of course, realize th[e] quite evident fact [that the defendant has chosen not to testify], even though the choice goes unmentioned.” Id., at 620-621..
The one person who usually knows most about the critical facts is the accused. For reasons deeply rooted in the history we share with England, the Bill of Rights included the Self-Incrimination Clause, which enables a defendant in a criminal trial to elect to make no contribution to the fact-finding process. But nothing in the Clause requires that jurors not draw logical inferences when a defendant chooses not to explain incriminating circumstances. Jurors have been instructed that the defendant is presumed to be innocent and that this presumption can be overridden only by *307evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. California Chief Justice Traynor commented that judges and prosecutors should be able to explain that “a jury [may] draw unfavorable inferences from the defendant’s failure to explain or refute evidence when he could reasonably be expected to do so. Such comment would not be evidence and would do no more than make clear to the jury the extent of its freedom in drawing inferences.” Traynor, The Devils of Due Process in Criminal Detection, Detention, and Trial, 33 U. Chi. L. Rev. 657, 677 (1966); accord, Schaefer, Police Interrogation and the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, 61 Nw. U. L. Rev. 506, 520 (1966).
I therefore would have joined Justices Stewart and White in dissent in Griffin. But Griffin is now the law, and based on that case the present petitioner was entitled to the jury instruction that he requested. I therefore join the opinion of the Court.