Court Opinion

ID: 9428985
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:25:23.011431+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:16.657518
License: Public Domain

Justice Brennan,
concurring in the judgment.
The Court today holds that
“a deponent’s civil deposition testimony, closely tracking his prior immunized testimony, is not, without duly authorized assurance of immunity at the time, immunized testimony within the meaning of § 6002, and therefore may not be compelled over a valid assertion of his Fifth Amendment privilege.” Ante, at 263-264 (footnote omitted).
Justice Blackmun’s opinion concurring in the judgment likewise states:
“In this case, we are asked to decide whether a witness who has testified before a federal grand jury pursuant to a grant of use immunity, 18 U. S. C. §§ 6001-6005, may be forced to testify about the same events in a subsequent civil deposition, despite his assertion of his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. I agree with the Court’s conclusion that he may not be forced so to testify.” Post, at 272.
I understand these to be two statements of the same rule,* and I completely agree with both of them. For this reason, I concur in the judgment of the Court.
*272I am not in entire agreement with everything in the majority opinion or in Justice Blackmun’s opinion. My differences with them, however, are over small matters of approach, and do not go to the substance of their conclusions. Moreover, this case arises in the rather specialized legal setting of use immunity statutes and does not require any broad-ranging analysis beyond the scope of the problem here presented. With these considerations in mind, I do not think it worthwhile to file a lengthy separate opinion setting forth these differences in detail.

While the majority’s statement of the holding is formally limited to the situation where a deponent’s deposition testimony “closely track[s] his prior immunized testimony,” ante, at 263, I do not take that to be a sub-, stantive difference between its formulation and that of Justice Black-mun. As both the majority’s opinion and Justice Stevens’ dissenting opinion, post, p. 282, make clear, the “closely tracking” situation is the strongest possible case for finding that the deposition testimony is derived from the prior immunized testimony. Hence, to hold that a deponent may assert his privilege in this case is necessarily to hold that he may do so in all cases, as Justice Blackmun states explicitly.