Court Opinion

ID: 9444578
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:05:31.254314+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:55.410052
License: Public Domain

*763CLARK, Chief Judge
(concurring).
I concur, but regretfully. For the steady and now precipitate erosion of the Fifth Amendment seems to me to have gone far beyond anything within the conception of those justices of the Supreme Court who by the narrowest of margins first gave support to the trend in the 1890s. And serious commentators have found this new statute peculiarly disturbing in policy and in law. Griswold, The Fifth Amendment Today 80-81 (1955); Taylor, Grand Inquest 217-221, 296-300 (1955); Barth, Government by Investigation 130-134 (1955). It undermines and so far forth nullifies one of the basic differences between our justice and that of systems we contemn, namely the principle that the individual shall not be forced to condemn himself. Practically, as we know, no formal immunity can protect a minority deviator from society’s dooms when he departs from its norms. And realistically viewed there is much in the defendant’s contention that at the end of the road is a charge of perjury supported by the oath of a renegade or paid informer. Convictions so obtained and punishment thus decreed cannot satisfy either the needs or the ideology of a democratic country committed to respect and toleration for dis- . , . . ... , _ sident minorities. But I can see no es-j, n . , . . cape from the Supreme Court decisions so carefully analyzed by Judge Weinfeld which, while they stand, are binding on US’