Court Opinion

ID: 9428219
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:23:10.056913+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:12.099554
License: Public Domain

Justice Rehnquist,
dissenting.
The Court has reached its conclusion in this case by a series of steps only the first of which is traceable to the United States Constitution. Yet since the result of the Court’s decision is to reverse the judgment of the Supreme *308Court of Kentucky, the decision must obviously rest upon the fact that the decision of that court is inconsistent with the United States Constitution.
As the Court points out, the constitutional question presented by this case is one the Court has specifically anticipated and reserved, first in Griffin v. California, 380 U. S. 609, 615, n. 6 (1965), and more recently in Lakeside v. Oregon, 435 U. S. 333 (1978).
But the Court, with a singular paucity of reasoning, points to the fact that in a case arising in the federal system, a defendant requesting a charge similar to that which petitioner requested here was held by this Court to be entitled to it. The differences, of course, are obvious: In the first place, the case of Bruno v. United States, 308 U. S. 287 (1939), was governed by the federal statute there cited:
“The accused could 'at his own request but not otherwise be a competent witness. And his failure to make such a request shall not create any presumption against him.’ Such was the command of the law-makers. The only way Congress could provide that abstention from testifying should not tell against an accused was by an implied direction to judges to exercise their traditional duty in guiding the jury by indicating the considerations relevant to the latter’s verdict on the facts. .... Con-cededly the charge requested by Bruno was correct. The Act of March 16, 1878, gave him the right to invoke it.” Id., at 292-293.
Here, of course, the Act of March 16, 1878, does not attempt to govern the procedures or instructions which shall be given in the trial courts of Kentucky. Therefore the Act of Congress which, in Bruno, was stated to entitle a defendant to a charge that no presumption should arise from his refusal to take the stand, is of no relevance whatever to the Court’s decision in this case.
If we begin with the relevant provisions of the Constitu*309tion, which is where an unsophisticated lawyer or layman would probably think we should begin, we find the provision in the Fifth Amendment stating that “[n]o person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself . . . Until the mysterious process of transmogrification by which this Amendment was held to be “incorporated” and made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment in Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U. S. 1 (1964), the provision itself would not have regulated the conduct of criminal trials in Kentucky. But even if it did, no one here claims that the defendant was forced to take the stand against his will or to testify against himself inconsistently with the provisions of the Fifth Amendment. The claim is rather that in Griffin v. California, supra, the Court, building on the language of the Constitution itself and on Malloy, supra, held that a charge to the effect that any evidence or facts adduced against the defendant which he could be reasonably expected to deny or explain could be taken into consideration by the jury violated the constitutional privilege against compulsory self-incrimination. The author of the present opinion dissented from that holding, stating:
“The formulation of procedural rules to govern the administration of criminal justice in the various States is properly a matter of local concern. We are charged with no general supervisory power over such matters; our only legitimate function is to prevent violations of the Constitution’s commands.” 380 U. S., at 623.
But even Griffin, supra, did not go as far as the present opinion, for as that opinion makes clear it left open the question of whether a state-court defendant was entitled as a matter of right to a charge that his refusal to take the stand should not be taken into consideration against him by the jury. The Court now decides that he is entitled to such a charge, and, I believe, in doing so, wholly retreats from the statement in the Griffin dissent that “[t]he formulation of *310procedural rules to govern the administration of criminal justice in the various States is properly a matter of local concern.”
The Court's opinion states, ante, at 301, that “[t]he Griffin case stands for the proposition that a defendant must pay no court-imposed price for the exercise of his constitutional privilege not to testify.” Such Thomistic reasoning is now carried from the constitutional provision itself, to the Griffin case, to the present case, and where it will stop no one can know. The concept of “burdens” and “penalties” is such a vague one that the Court's decision allows a criminal defendant in a state proceeding virtually to take from the trial judge any control over the instructions to be given to the jury in the case being tried. I can find no more apt words with which to conclude this dissent than those stated by Justice Harlan, concurring in the Court’s opinion in Griffin:
“Although compelled to concur in this decision, I am free to express the hope that the Court will eventually return to constitutional paths which, until recently, it has followed throughout its history.” 380 U. S., at 617.