Court Opinion

ID: 9421441
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:58:17.971836+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:30.249557
License: Public Domain

*425Mr. Justice Black,
with whom The Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Douglas, and Mr. Justice Brennan join,
concurring.
I concur in the reversal of these cases for the reasons given in the Court’s opinion with one exception.
In No. 184, the petitioner, Halperin, appeared before a grand jury in response to a subpoena. There he declined to answer certain questions relying on the provision of the Fifth Amendment that “No person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”
Later, at his trial, Halperin took the stand to testify in his own behalf. On cross-examination the prosecuting attorney asked him the same questions that he had refused to answer before the grand jury. This time Halperin answered the questions; his answers tended to show that he was innocent of any wrong-doing. The Government was then permitted over objection to draw from him the fact that he had previously refused to answer these questions before the grand jury on the ground that his answers might tend to incriminate him.
At the conclusion of the trial the judge instructed the jury that Halperin’s claim of his constitutional privilege not to be a witness against himself could be considered in determining what weight should be given to his testimony — in other words, whether Halperin was a truthful and trustworthy witness. I agree with the Court that use of this claim of constitutional privilege to reflect upon Halperin’s credibility was error, but I do not, like the Court, rest my conclusion on the special circumstances of this case. I can think of no special circumstances that would justify use of a constitutional privilege to discredit or convict a person who asserts it. The value of constitutional privileges is largely destroyed if persons can be penalized for relying on them. It seems peculiarly *426incongruous and indefensible for courts which exist and act only under the Constitution to draw inferences of lack of honesty from invocation of a privilege deemed worthy of enshrinement in the Constitution. To the extent that approval of such a rule in Raffel v. United States, 271 U. S. 494, has vitality after Johnson v. United States, 318 U. S. 189, 196-199, I think the Raffel case should be explicitly overruled.