Court Opinion

ID: 9490545
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:46:35.611367+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:09.790633
License: Public Domain

EDMONDSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring specially:
For a good, long time in English-speaking countries, this proposition has been the rule: the public has a right to every person’s testimony. By “rule,” I mean the normal principle of law. This rule recognizes the importance of learning the truth. And under the rule, Mr. Gecas would be obliged to testify.
The rule has exceptions. The exceptions, by their nature, interfere with the search for truth. One of the exceptions — perhaps, the most important — is carved out by the Fifth *1458Amendment.1 This case presents the question of whether or not the American Constitution’s Fifth Amendment exception to the rule is so broad as to cover criminal actions in courts that are not American courts, but courts of foreign countries.
For interpreting the Fifth Amendment exception, here is how things stand. Most important, no one has been able to show that the Framers- — or Ratifiers — of the Fifth Amendment really contemplated criminal actions in foreign courts. And as Judge Tjoflat has demonstrated, a history-based,2 reasoned, and reasonable argument can be made that the Fifth Amendment exception would not reach criminal actions in courts that are not American courts. In addition, most appellate courts, when the question was before them, have held that the exception does not reach criminal actions in foreign courts.
This legal setting does not compel federal courts to extend the Fifth Amendment exception to cover foreign criminal actions. We cannot say with a reasonable degree of certainty3 that the Fifth Amendment was intended to reach foreign criminal actions. The judicial branch has no clear authority to interfere with the acts of the executive branch in the present case. So, I am bound to apply not the exception, but the rule: the public, acting through its government’s processes, has the right to Mr. Gecas’s testimony-
On this basis,41 would affirm the judgment of the district court.
BIRCH, Circuit Judge, dissenting, in which ANDERSON, DUBINA and BARKETT, Circuit Judges, join:
The court’s majority today allows the United States government to enlist the aid of an Article III court to imprison a citizen or permanent resident until he responds to a prosecutor’s questions, and then to transfer that citizen or permanent resident to another prison for his prosecution on the basis of his statements. The court allows such a result because the second prison is a foreign, as opposed to a domestic, one. This result is inconsistent with the language of the Fifth Amendment, its history, and the policies underlying the privilege that the Amendment incorporates into the Constitution.1 I respectfully dissent.
Part I addresses the central issue in this case: whether a real and substantial fear of *1459foreign prosecution is a valid basis for the invocation of the right against self-incrimination. First, I review the policies underlying the right against self-incrimination and demonstrate that denying that right to a witness who has a reasonable fear of foreign prosecution defeats these policies. Next, I discuss the Supreme Court’s immunity cases and conclude that these cases do not support the majority’s holding that the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on compelling incriminating testimony is merely a “prophylactic rule” that has no application when the using sovereign2 is foreign. I also review the Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy v. Waterfront Commission,3 so faeilely dismissed by the majority, and find that this decision virtually compels the conclusion that a fear of foreign prosecution justifies a witness’s invocation of the privilege against self-incrimination. I then challenge both the majority’s selective reading of the historical development of the Fifth Amendment as well as its suggestion that possible burdens imposed on domestic law enforcement by allowing the privilege to be invoked in this instance justifies infringing a person’s constitutional right.
I address and reject the government’s waiver argument in Part II. I conclude in Part III that compelling Gecas to answer OSI’s questions would violate his constitutional privilege against self-incrimination. At the end of my discussion, it is my fervent hope that the following conclusion, articulated by former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, will be shared by the reader:
The fundamental value that the privilege reflects is intangible, it is true; but so is liberty, and so is man’s immortal soul. A man may be punished, even put to death, by the state; but ... he should not be made to prostrate himself before its majesty. Mea culpa belongs to a man and his God. It is a plea that cannot be exacted from free men by human authority. To require it is to insist that the state is the superior of the individuals who compose it, instead of their instrument.4
I. APPLICATION OF THE SELF-INCRIMINATION CLAUSE TO A PERSON WHO FEARS FOREIGN PROSECUTION
I concur in Parts I and II of the majority opinion. It is clear that Gecas faces a real, substantial, reasonable, and appreciable fear of foreign prosecution. The question, therefore, is whether Gecas can validly assert his constitutional right against self-incrimination on the basis of his fear of foreign prosecution. As the majority opinion demonstrates, an internally consistent, logical argument can be constructed to support a negative answer to this question.5 As the Second Circuit’s opinion in United States v. Balsys6 and several district court opinions7 reflect, and as I shall illustrate below, an equally internally consistent and logical argument can be made to support the opposite conclusion.
We are called upon, as appellate judges, to make the difficult choice between these two competing answers to a question that relates to a fundamental precept of our conception of government, individual rights, and the relationship between the two. I submit that the *1460force of logic alone cannot resolve the difficult question before us. The force of history and the policies underlying the constitutional right against self-incrimination, as well as its treatment in the Supreme Court, however, do; as the Supreme Court has said: “The answer to this question must depend, of course, on whether [the resulting] application of the privilege promotes or defeats its policies and purposes.”8 These policies and purposes compel the inescapable conclusion that our government cannot force a person to answer questions if that person has a real and substantial fear of prosecution, whether domestic or foreign.
A. The Right Against Self-Incrimination: Underlying Policies
“The privilege against self-incrimination registers an important advance in the development of our liberty — one of the great landmarks in man’s struggle to make himself civilized.”9 Fundamentally, the Fifth Amendment privilege supports two goals: constraining the government from overzealous prosecution of individuals and securing individual liberties.10
In Murphy, Justice Goldberg identified the first rationale as “our preference for an accu-satorial rather than an inquisitorial system of criminal justice; [and] our fear that self-incriminating statements will be elicited by inhumane treatment and abuses.”11 This rationale is systemic in nature because its purpose is to ensure the integrity of our criminal justice system by imposing limits on the power of government as a prosecutor.12
With respect to the second rationale, Justice Goldberg observed:
[The privilege] reflects many of our fundamental values and most noble aspirations: our unwillingness to subject those suspected of crime to the cruel trilemma of self-accusation, perjury or contempt; ... our sense of fair play which dictates “a fair state-individual balance by requiring the government to leave the individual alone until good cause is shown for disturbing him and by requiring the government in its contest with the individual to shoulder the entire load” ... [and] our respect for the inviolability of the human personality and of the right of each individual “to a private enclave where he may lead a private life”.... 13
This second rationale can be described as rights-based, as it focuses on the individual’s interest in privacy and freedom from cruelty.14
*1461The Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from either compelling a witness who has a reasonable fear of prosecution to testify against his penal interests,15 or using a witness’s compelled testimony or its fruits in prosecuting that witness.16 The systemic rationale for the Fifth Amendment is fully served by applying the second prohibition: So long as compelled testimony or its fruits cannot be used by our government to convict an accused, our system of criminal justice is protected from the corrupting influence of overzealous prosecution. By this view, the prohibition against the act of compelling a witness’s testimony in the absence of a grant of immunity (i.e., when the witness has a reasonable fear of prosecution on the basis of that testimony) is merely “prophylactic,” as the majority labels it.17 The prohibition against use alone, however, does not promote, and in fact defeats, the rights-based rationale of the Fifth Amendment. The facts of this case make this point abundantly clear. Compelling Gecas to answer OSI’s questions even though he has a reasonable fear of prosecution on the basis of his answers in no way reflects on the integrity of our criminal system of justice because there is no possibility that he will be criminally prosecuted in the United States. Nonetheless, the fact that Gecas’s fear is of foreign prosecution, not domestic prosecution, does not relieve the “cruel trilemma of self-accusation, perjury or contempt” or vindicate “our respect for the inviolability of the human personality and of the right of each individual to a private enclave where he may lead a private life.”18 Thus, in light of the policies of the Fifth Amendment, the Court’s prohibition on forcing a witness to incriminate himself when that witness has a reasonable fear of prosecution is no more a “prophylactic rule” than the prohibition on using such compelled testimony is merely “remedial.” Both prohibitions are essential for the vindication of all the policies underlying the privilege.
The majority seeks to support its conclusion that the Fifth Amendment may not be invoked if the witness fears only foreign prosecution by (1) misinterpreting Supreme Court case law on the type of immunity necessary to remove the fear of prosecution; (2) dismissing summarily the import of the Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy; and (3) appealing to history in order to reach the conclusion that the Fifth Amendment has no rights-based rationale because the sole purpose of its framers was to limit the power of the federal government from overreaching in domestic law enforcement. None of these rationales is convincing.
B. The Immunity Cases
The majority holds that the prohibition on forcing a witness to testify against his penal interests is merely a “prophylactic rule” that has no application when the using sovereign is foreign. In this section, I review the Supreme Court’s immunity cases and conclude that these precedents do not stand for the sweeping proposition adopted by the ma*1462jority. Rather, these eases confirm that whether a government subject to the strictures of the Fifth Amendment may compel a witness’s testimony is contingent on the precondition that such testimony cannot be used in any criminal prosecution of the witness; they do not support the majority’s conclusion that a reasonable fear of prosecution in a foreign court may be ignored by a compelling domestic court. Moreover, a review of the Supreme Court’s decisions on Miranda19 warnings, which the Court has recognized as “prophylactic,” demonstrates that the majority’s use of the “prophylactic rule” concept is inconsistent with that of the Supreme Court in a related Fifth Amendment context.
In Kastigar v. United States,20 the Supreme Court held that “immunity from use and derivative use [of compelled testimony] is coextensive with the scope of the privilege against self-incrimination, and therefore is sufficient to compel testimony over a claim of the privilege.”21 The majority in this case interprets Kastigar as having held that the Fifth Amendment “only protects against ... the actual ‘infliction of criminal penalties on the witness’ — a criminal conviction — based on self-incrimination.”22 The majority claims that, therefore, the prohibition on compelling a witness to testify against his penal interests is merely a “prophylactic rule” that is not required when the using sovereign is a foreign government and thus not subject to the Fifth Amendment. This interpretation of Kastigar, however, ignores a crucial analytical step in the Court’s reasoning. The Kastigar Court actually stated that the “sole concern [of the privilege] is to afford protection against being forced to give testimony leading to the infliction of penalties affixed to ... criminal acts.”23 The difference between the Court’s reasoning in Kastigar and the majority’s recasting of that reasoning is not mere semantics. The focus of Kastigar, as is that of the Fifth Amendment, is on the act of compelling testimony: A domestic court is absolutely prohibited from engaging in such an act ifthe testimony could lead to a criminal conviction; that is, Kastigar recasts in the context of an immunity statute the requirement that the fear of prosecution must be reasonable to justify the invocation of the privilege against self-incrimination. The granting of use and derivative use immunity removes the danger of conviction on the basis of the compelled testimony and, thus, removes the necessary pre-condition (i.e., fear of use or derivative use of compelled testimony in a criminal prosecution) to a proper invocation of the privilege; at least it does so in the usual case involving a potential domestic prosecution.
This point is illuminated when we consider the Kastigar Court’s explication of one aspect of Murphy. In Murphy, the Court held that a state does not violate a witness’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination24 when it compels the testimony by granting the witness immunity because the Constitution prohibits federal authorities from using such compelled testimony or its fruits in a federal prosecution.25 The Court explained in Kastigar: “The Murphy Court was concerned solely with the danger of incrimination under federal law, and held that immunity from use and derivative use was sufficient to displace the danger.”26 Indeed, the Murphy Court explicitly held that the state defendants in that case were justified in refusing to answer the questions even though they were granted immunity from state prosecution because, “[a]t the time they refused *1463to answer, ... petitioners had a reasonable fear ... that the federal authorities might use the answers against them in connection with a federal prosecution.”27 Accordingly, the Court vacated the state court’s contempt citations and directed that the defendants be afforded an opportunity to answer the questions once they were guaranteed that federal prosecution could not ensue from them.28
This understanding of Kastigar is consistent with the Supreme Court’s historic approach to immunity statutes. In Brown v. Walker29 the Court upheld a federal statute which provided that the Interstate Commerce Commission may compel the testimony of a witness over a claim of self-incrimination but afforded the witness transactional immunity for all offenses related to the compelled testimony. The Court began by reviewing the various situations in which testimony may be compelled. It concluded that “[wjhen examined, these cases will all be found to be based upon the idea that, if the testimony sought cannot possibly be used as a basis of, or in aid of, a criminal prosecution against the witness, the [privilege] ceases to apply.”30 Thus, because the statute’s grant of immunity removed in Brown the possibility of a prosecution on the basis of the compelled testimony, the privilege did not apply.
Nothing in Brown suggests, however, that the prosecution in question must be one by the federal government, at that time the only jurisdiction subject to thé Fifth Amendment. Indeed, the witness in Brown argued that his testimony could not be compelled despite the grant of immunity from federal prosecution because he could be subject, possibly, to state or foreign prosecution on the basis of his testimony. The Court rejected these arguments, but not because state and foreign governments are not subject to the Fifth Amendment, as the majority suggests in this case.31 Rather, the Court responded that, under the Supremacy Clause, the statute at issue foreclosed state as well as federal prosecution on the basis of immunized testimony and thus obviated the danger of both state and federal prosecution.32 As to the danger of foreign prosecution, the Court said:
But, even granting that there were still a bare possibility that, by his disclosure, he might be subjected to the criminal laws of some other sovereignty, that ... is not a real and probable danger, with reference to the ordinary operations of the law in the ordinary courts, but a danger of an imaginary and unsubstantial character, having reference to some extraordinary and barely possible contingency, so improbable that no reasonable man would suffer it to influence his conduct. Such dangers it was never the object of the provision to obviate.33
In short, Brown and Kastigar confirm that whether a government subject to the strictures of the Fifth Amendment may compel a witness’s testimony is contingent on the precondition that such testimony cannot be used in any criminal prosecution of the witness. The two cases stand for the proposition that, when the danger of such use can be effectively removed through the grant of immunity or operation of law, as is usually the case when the only reasonable danger is of domestic *1464prosecution, the testimony may be compelled; Brown and Kastigar do not' support the majority’s conclusion that a reasonable fear of prosecution in a foreign court may be ignored by a compelling domestic court.
According to the majority, the prohibition imposed by the Fifth Amendment on domestic courts to force witnesses to testify against their penal interests is merely a “prophylactic rule,” intended only to ensure that domestic courts do not use the testimony to convict the witnesses. The majority’s use of this label, however, is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s understanding of the meaning of a “prophylactic rule.” Indeed, the Court has explained just what a prophylactic rule is, and it did so in the context of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. In Miranda v. Arizona,34 the Court established a series of procedural safeguards governing custodial interrogation of suspects in order to insure that coerced testimony is not obtained in violation of the Fifth Amendment. The Court has recognized the Miranda warnings as “prophylactic” because they “are ‘not themselves rights protected by the Constitution but [are] instead measures to insure that the right against compulsory self-incrimination [is] protected.’ ”35 Indeed, the Miranda Court itself had conceded that the safeguards it established were not specifically required by the text of the Constitution.36 By contrast, the Supreme Court has never suggested that the Constitution would allow a domestic court to compel self-incriminating testimony despite the existence of a reasonable fear of prosecution. Lefkowitz v. Turley,37 which the ■ majority erroneously cites in support of its “prophylactic” label, in fact confirms that the Constitution absolutely prohibits a domestic court from compelling the self-incriminating testimony of a witness, absent adequate immunity to remove the danger that the compelled testimony would be used against the witness in a criminal prosecution. The Court stated:
The object of the Amendment “was to insure that a person should not be compelled, when acting as a witness in any . investigation, to give testimony which might tend to show that he himself had committed a crime.” Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U.S. 547, 562, 12 S.Ct. 195, 198, 35 L.Ed. 1110 (1892).... [A] witness protected by the privilege may rightfully refuse to answer unless and until he is protected at least against the use of his compelled answers and evidence derived therefrom in any subsequent criminal ease in which he is a defendant.38
If that were not so, the Court would not have held unconstitutional the very first immunity statute which it considered in Counselman v. Hitchcock,39 In that case, the statute at issue required a witness to answer questions, regardless of the potential incriminating nature of the answers, after being granted immunity against the actual use of the compelled testimony in a subsequent criminal prosecution of the witness. The Court struck down the statute as unconstitutional because it did not grant the witness derivative use immunity; that is, the statute did not preclude the use of evidence uncovered as a result of the compelled testimony.40 If the prohibition on compulsion were merely a prophylactic rule not required by the Constitution, and in light of the familiar rule that the Court should not strike down an act of *1465Congress unless absolutely necessary,41 it stands to reason that the Court would have both upheld the statute but declared that courts are required in future prosecutions to exclude the testimony itself as well as its fruits. Thus, the prohibition on forcing a witness to testify against his own penal interests is not a prudential, prophylactic rule imposed by the Supreme Court on lower federal courts. Rather, it is a requirement of the Constitution itself.
C. The Murphy Decision
The Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy v. Waterfront Commission42 bolsters the conclusion that a fear of foreign prosecution justifies a witness’s invocation of the privilege against self-incrimination. Indeed, it compels that conclusion. In this section, I begin by describing the facts and holding of Murphy and then analyze each part of the Court’s opinion to demonstrate that every step in the Court’s reasoning dictates this conclusion.
In Murphy, two witnesses asserted their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at a hearing before the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor and refused to testify despite a grant of immunity from prosecution under New York and New Jersey law because of fear of prosecution in federal court. They were cited for contempt and New Jersey’s highest court affirmed the citation. The Supreme Court reversed, holding “the constitutional rule to be that a state witness may not be compelled to give testimony which may be incriminating under federal law unless the compelled testimony and its fruits cannot be used in any manner by federal officials in connection with a criminal prosecution against him.”43 The Court further held, however, “that in order to implement this constitutional rule and aceommo-date the interests of the State and Federal Governments in investigating and prosecuting crime, the Federal Government must be prohibited from making any such use of compelled testimony and its fruits.”44 This rule removed the witnesses’ fear of federal prosecution on the basis of compelled testimony and, thus, allowed the state to compel testimony under a grant of state immunity.
The Supreme Court decided Murphy on the same day it decided that the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is applicable to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.45 Thus, in Murphy, both the compelling jurisdiction — the state — and the potentially using jurisdiction — the federal government — were subject to the Fifth Amendment. The majority’s claim, however, that Murphy’s application of the Self-Incrimination Clause to both the compelling sovereign and the using sovereign “was inextricably tied to a simultaneous decision applying the Self-Incrimination Clause to both jurisdictions”46 and is applicable only in that context ignores the language and reasoning of Murphy.
The Court in Murphy presented its analysis in three parts, all of which address the issue before us today. First, the Murphy Court admonished that whether the privilege against self-incrimination applies in a given situation “must depend, of course, on whether such an application of the privilege promotes or defeats its policies and purposes.” 47 It then explained the policies and purposes of the privilege and concluded that
[mjost, if not all, of these policies and purposes are defeated when a witness can be whipsawed into incriminating himself under both state and federal law____ This has become especially true in our age of *1466cooperative federalism, where Federal and State Governments are waging a united front against many types of criminal activity.48
The rule adopted by the majority in this case clearly defeats at least some of the policies and purposes of the privilege — namely those implementing the rights-based rationale of the privilege — as I have already shown.49 As one district court noted, “this ‘whipsaw’ af-feet does not end at our borders but is equally relevant when the prosecuting body is a foreign nation instead of a state.”50 This is especially true in this era of increasing international cooperation in criminal investigations and prosecutions.51
*1467Second, the Court reviewed in Murphy early English and American law cases which involved invocation of the privilege against self-incrimination for fear of prosecution in a foreign jurisdiction. The Court’s review of early American case law focused on Chief Justice Marshall’s opinion in United States v. Saline Bank.52 In that ease, the defendants invoked their privilege against self-incrimination and refused to comply with the federal government’s request to discover certain evidence. Significantly, the evidence sought by the government exposed the defendants to criminal prosecution in Virginia state court only, to which the Fifth Amendment clearly did not apply at that time. Chief Justice Marshall’s opinion for a unanimous Court reads as follows:
This is a bill in equity for a discovery and relief. The defendants set up a plea in bar, alleging that the discovery would subject them to penalties under the statute of Virginia.
The Court below decided in favour of the validity of the plea, and dismissed the bill.
It is apparent that in every step of the suit, the facts required to be discovered in support of this suit would expose the parties to danger. The rule clearly is, that a party is not bound to make any discovery which would expose him to penalties, and this case falls within it.
The decree of the Court below is therefore affirmed.53
The Murphy Court observed that Saline Bank “squarely holds that the privilege against self-incrimination protects a witness in a federal court from being compelled to give testimony which could be used against him in a state court,” even though the same privilege clearly did not apply to the states at that time.54
Notably, the Court had recognized the import of Saline Bank in a previous decision. *1468In Ballmann v. Fagin,55 the defendant had been held in contempt for refusing to answer certain questions before a federal grand jury on the ground that his answer might incriminate him under the laws of the state in which the grand jury was sitting.56 In an opinion by Justice Holmes, the Court reversed the contempt citation, and held that “[according to United States v. Saline Bank, [the defendant] was exonerated from disclosures which would have exposed him to the penalties of the state law.”57 Significantly, Ballmann too was decided at a time when the Fifth Amendment had not yet been declared applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, it is abundantly clear that the Murphy Court’s holding was not inextricably tied to the simultaneous Malloy decision applying the privilege to state courts. The Court said as much when it stated: “In light of the history, policies and purposes of the privilege against self-incrimination, we now accept as correct the construction given the privilege by ... Chief Justice Marshall and Justice Holmes.”58
Equally instructive is the Murphy Court’s review of early English case law involving invocation of the privilege against self-incrimination for fear of prosecution in a foreign jurisdiction.59 The Murphy Court *1469looked at four English cases. The first two cases date from before the framing of the Constitution and hold that fear of prosecution in another jurisdiction justified the invocation of the privilege in an English court. In East India Co. v. Campbell,60 the defendant refused to reveal evidence which would have exposed him to prosecution in the courts of India.61 The Court of the Exchequer upheld the privilege.62 The following year, the court applied the same rule in Brownsword v. Edwards.63 In that case, the defendant refused to reveal to the court whether she was lawfully married to a certain individual because doing so would have opened her to prosecution by the ecclesiastical courts.64 The majority discounts the importance of Brownsword and Campbell on the basis that the two cases involved jurisdictions “ ‘operating within the same legislative sovereignty’ ” as the English courts.65
A review of the English court opinions, however, strongly suggests that these courts viewed the ecclesiastical courts and the courts of India as distinct and independent entities.66 More importantly, what is of importance here is how the Murphy Court viewed and interpreted these cases. The Murphy Court viewed the two early English cases as standing for the proposition that a fear of foreign prosecution justifies the invocation of the privilege in a domestic court. First, the Court began its review of Chief Justice Marshall’s decision in Saline Bank by stating that “[i]t was against this background of English case law that this Court in 1828 decided” Saline Bank67 Thus, it is clear that the Murphy Court viewed Brownsword and Campbell as support for Saline Bank, which squarely held that fear of prosecution by a sovereign not subject to the Fifth Amendment nonetheless justifies invocation of the privilege in a court of the United States.68 *1470Second, the Murphy Court’s interpretation of the early English eases becomes even clearer when the Court reviewed a later case, United States v. McRae,69 and concluded that it represented the English rule.
In McRae, the United States government sued in an English court for an accounting of monies allegedly received by the defendant as an agent to the confederate states during the American civil war. The defendant refused to answer on the basis that his answers might subject him to criminal penalties in the United States. On the authority of King of the Two Sicilies v. Willcox,70 the United States argued that McRae could not claim the privilege since there was no risk of incrimination under English laws. In Willcox, the Chancery Court had compelled a defendant to testify even though he claimed that his answers might incriminate him under the laws of Sicily.71 However, as the Murphy Court noted, and as the McRae court later explained, the Chancery Court had compelled the defendant’s testimony in Willcox on two grounds: “(1) ‘The impossibility of knowing, as matter of law, to what eases the objection, when resting on the danger of incurring penal consequences in a foreign country, may extend ...’; and (2) the fact that ‘in such a case, in order to make the disclosure dangerous to the party who objects, it is essential that he should first quit the protection of our laws, and willfully go within the jurisdiction of the laws he has violated.’ ”72 The McRae court thus rejected the plaintiffs construction of Willcox and held that the defendant could invoke the privilege in an English court, although the only penalties he feared were in another, foreign jurisdiction.73
The majority’s attempt to distinguish McRae on the basis “of the obvious factual distinctions between McRae and the present case” is, at best, unconvincing. To reject the plaintiffs interpretation of Willcox, the McRae court did not rely on the fact that the plaintiff in that case was the United States, the very sovereign under which laws the defendant might be subject to criminal penalties. As the Murphy Court noted, “the Court of Chancery held [in McRae ] that where there is a real danger of prosecution in a foreign country, the case could not be distinguished ‘in principle from one where a witness is protected from answering any question which has a tendency to expose him to forfeiture for a breach of our own municipal law.’ ”74 Moreover, what is relevant for our purpose is what the Murphy Court understood McRae to stand for. The Court in Murphy contrasted McRae with Willcox and declared that McRae, “not [Willcox ], represents the settled ‘English rule’ regarding self-incrimination under foreign law.”75 The Court’s decision in Murphy is quite clear: “In light of the history, policies and purposes of the privilege against self-incrimination, we now accept as correct the construction given the privilege by the English courts and by Chief Justice Marshall [in Saline Bank ] and Justice Holmes [in Bollmann ].”76 It is in no way confined to the limited view of McRae that the majority suggests.77
*1471In part III of the Murphy opinion, the Court considered then-recent Supreme Court cases involving situations where a defendant in one domestic court had invoked the privilege against self-incrimination for fear of prosecution in another, domestic jurisdiction. The Court overruled in Murphy three cases which had held that the privilege can be invoked only where the danger is of a prosecution in the courts of the compelling sovereign.78 The Court’s treatment of these eases is highly instructive. Of the three cases, two involved testimony compelled in state court which was not, at the time, subject to the Fifth Amendment. Feldman involved the use by federal authorities of testimony compelled by a state under a grant of state immunity. The Court, relying on case law developed in the context of the Fourth Amendment, had held in Feldman that, since it was not illegal for a state to compel the testimony, the federal government was not precluded from using the compelled testimony in a federal prosecution.79 The Court explained in Murphy that the legal foundation of Feldman was no longer valid because of the subsequent application of the Fourth Amendment to the states.80 Knapp involved a situation where a defendant in state court refused to testify, despite a grant of state immunity, because of a fear of federal prosecution. The Court had held in Knapp that the Fifth Amendment did not apply to the states and, thus, there was no violation of the federal Constitution.81 The Court explained in Murphy that the foundation of Knapp also was no longer valid in view of the Court’s determination in Malloy that the Fifth Amendment does apply to the States through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.82 In sum, the Court concluded that, although both Feldman and Knapp had been correctly decided in light of the state of the law at the time they were rendered, neither ease constituted valid, binding precedent because the Court, in the interim, had overruled the reasoning underlying these decisions.
By contrast, the Murphy Court overruled Murdock because it was wrongly decided. Murdock involved a situation similar to the one presented in this case: the defendant invoked the privilege against self-incrimination in federal court for fear of prosecution in the courts of another sovereign not bound by the Self-Incrimination Clause; in Murdock, however, that other sovereign was a domestic state.83 Significantly, the Court in Murphy did not simply argue that Murdock was no *1472longer good law because the Malloy decision changed the premise of that opinion. Rather, the Murphy Court analyzed the reasoning of Murdock, including its erroneous reliance on Willcox as “the English rule,”84 and concluded that “neither the reasoning nor the authority relied on by the Court in [Mur-dock ] supports its conclusion that the Fifth Amendment permits the Federal Government to compel answers to questions which might incriminate under state law,” even though the state was not subject to the Self-Incrimination Clause at that time.85
In short, I recognize that Murphy arose in a context distinguishable from this case and, thus, technically, did not decide the issue before us. I am convinced, however, that only a strained reading of the Court’s opinion and wholesale discounting of the reasoning embodied in it could lead one to reach the conclusion of the majority in this case.
D. Purposes of the Privilege: The Historic Perspective
The majority embarks on a lengthy foray into history in order to refute Geeas’s claim that the Self-Incrimination Clause is not only a limit on the criminal procedures of domestic governments, but also embodies a personal right that protects a person’s privacy and dignity. The majority’s effort is unconvincing because (1) it falls short of the ambitious proposition it seeks to advance and (2) it is contradicted by many Supreme Court discussions of this issue.
I do not dispute any of the historical facts reported by the majority. Nor do I dispute the conclusion from these facts that the privilege against self-incrimination arose in England and was later enshrined in the Constitution of several American states as well as that of the United States in large part as “a protest against the inquisitorial and manifestly unjust methods of interrogating accused persons.”86 That the abuses of government in suppressing political and religious freedom through the use of inquisitional procedures, both in England and the colonies, were the catalysts for several of the rights protected by the Bill of Rights is axiomatic. But that does not mean that the only purpose of these rights, as embodied in the Bill of Rights, was to curb the power of the federal government in that regard. Indeed, if that were so, it would appear that the First Amendment alone would have done the job.87 Similarly, the historical account of the majority does not support its sweeping conclusion that the Framers saw in the privilege only a limit on the federal government’s criminal procedures and no individual liberty values. The two purposes simply are not contradictory; indeed, to a large extent, they are complementary. The first ten amendments to the Constitution are included in a Bill of Rights, which is also a bill of limitations on government power. In Murphy, the Supreme Court was faced with an argument similar to that of the majority as a justification for confining the application of the Self-Incrimination Clause to fear of incrimination under the laws of the compelling sovereign. The Court had this to say:
It has been argued that permitting a witness in one jurisdiction within our federal structure to invoke the privilege on the ground that he fears prosecution in another jurisdiction:
“is rational only if the policy of the privilege is assumed to be to excuse the witness from the unpleasantness, the indignity, the ‘unnatural’ conduct of denouncing himself. [But] the policy of the privilege is not this. The policy of the privilege is to regulate a *1473particular government-governed relation-— first, to help prevent inhumane treatment of persons from whom information is desired and, second, to satisfy popular sentíment that, when powerful and impersonal government arrays its forces against solitary governed, it would be a violation of the individual’s ‘sovereignty1 and less than fair for the government to be permitted to conscript the knowledge of the governed to its aid. Where the crime is a foreign crime, any motive to inflict brutality upon a person because of the incriminating nature of the disclosure — any ‘conviction hunger’ as such — is absent. And the sentiments relating to the rules of war between government and governed do not apply where the two are not at war”----
“Thus, reasoning from its rationales, the privilege should not apply no matter how incriminating is the disclosure under foreign law and no matter how probable is prosecution by the foreign sovereignty. This is so whether the relevant two sover-eignties are different nations, different states, or different sovereignties (such as federal and state) with jurisdiction over the same geographical area.” 8 Wigmore, Evidence (McNaughton rev., 1961), 345. As noted in the text, however, the privilege against self-incrimination represents many fundamental values and aspirations. It is “an expression of the moral striving of the community .... a reflection of our common conscience .... ” Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. [at] 9[, n. 7], 84 S.Ct. [at] 1494, n. 7, quoting Griswold, The Fifth Amendment Today (1955), 73. That is why it is regarded as so fundamental a part of our constitutional fabric, despite the fact that “the law and the lawyers ... have never made up their minds just what it is supposed to do or just whom it is intended to protect.” Kalven, Invoicing the Fifth Amendment — Some Legal and Impractical Considerations, 9 Bull. Atomic Sci. 181, 182. It will not do, therefore, to assign one isolated policy to the privilege, and then to argue that since “the” policy may not be furthered measurably by applying the privilege across state-federal unes, it follows that the privilege should not he so applied.88
Moreover, the majority’s account, though long, is not exhaustive. It de-emphasizes and virtually ignores aspects of the development of the right against self-incrimination that evince its natural law roots.89 This view of the right was first articulated by John Lilburne, the person whose punishment in 1637 for refusing to take the inquisitional oath before the Star Chamber led to the abolition of that tribunal. After being subjected to severe corporal punishment for refusing to take the oath, John Lilburne addressed the crowds, explaining that the inquisitional oath was “an oath against the law of the land ... [and] absolutely against the law of God; for that law requires no man to accuse himself.”90 John Bradshaw, Lil-burne’s counsel in 1645 before the House of Commons on Lilburne’s petition to declare his conviction by the Star Chamber illegal and award him reparations, argued that the inquisitional oath was contrary “to the laws of God, nature, and the kingdom, for any man to be his own accuser.”91 “The Level-lers, led by Lilburne, ... claimed a right not to answer any questions concerning themselves, if life, liberty, or property might be jeopardized, regardless of the tribunal or government agency directing the examination, be it judicial, legislative, or executive.” 92
The common-law courts later emphasized the natural law roots of the right. “To furnish testimonial evidence against himself, with or without oath, was likened to drawing *1474one’s blood, running oneself upon the pikes, or cutting one’s throat with one’s tongue.”93 Lord Chief Baron Geoffrey Gilbert, whose Law of Evidence was well-known in the American colonies, wrote that although a confession was the best proof of guilt, “ ‘this Confession must be voluntary and without Compulsion; for our Law in this differs from the Civil Law, that it will not force any Man to accuse himself; and in this we do certainly follow the Law of Nature, which commands every Man to encourage his own Preservation.’ ”94 Thus, as the Supreme Court recognized:
There can be no doubt that long prior to our independence the doctrine that one accused of crime could not be compelled to testify against himself had reached its full development in the common law, was there considered as resting on the law of nature, and was imbedded in that system as one of its great and distinguishing attributes.95
Consonant with this view, common-law courts even expanded the right beyond its initial concern for potential penal consequences to protect a witness from answering questions that might subject the witness to disgrace or infamy.96 For example, Lord Chief Justice George Treby declared, as early as 1696:
“Men have been asked whether they have been convicted and pardoned for felony, or whether they have been whipped for petty larceny: but they have not been obliged to answer; for though their answer in the affirmative will not make them criminal, or subject them to a punishment, yet they are matters of infamy; and if it be an infamous thing, that is enough to preserve a man from being bound to answer. A pardoned man is not guilty, his crime is purged; but merely for the reproach of it, it shall not be put upon him to answer a question whereon he will be forced to forswear or disgrace himself____ The like have been observed in other eases of odious and infamous matters which were not crimes indictable.” 97
Such a broad understanding of the privilege highlights the fact that it came to focus as much on the dignity of the individual as it functioned as a limit on the power of government. That the right later contracted back to protecting the witness from answering questions that might expose him to penal consequences does not necessarily mean that individual dignity was no longer one of its underlying rationales.98
*1475It is undeniable that the early colonists in America, like their English ancestors, asserted the right against self-incrimination in response to the government’s political repression. But the majority’s conclusion from this fact that the colonists asserted the right exclusively as a limit on government’s power and not additionally as an expression of individual dignity is not a necessary one. The majority ignores the practical reality that rights cannot be asserted in the abstract; people claim rights as against the government when they perceive that the government is abusing them. When the colonists claimed the right, moreover, they claimed it as part of “English Liberty,”99 thus incorporating all that the right signified to their English ancestors into their own conceptions of the right. The right
grew so in popularity that in 1735 Benjamin Franklin, hearing that a church wanted to examine the sermons of an unorthodox minister could declare: “It was contrary to the common Rights of Mankind, no Man being obliged to furnish Matter of Accusation against himself.” In 1754, a witness parried a Massachusetts legislative investigation into seditious libel by quoting the well-known Latin maxim [nemo tenetur seipsum ac-ensare ], which he freely translated as “A Right of Silence as the Privilege of every Englishman.” In 1770 the attorney general of Pennsylvania ruled that an admiralty court could not oblige people to answer interrogatories “which may have a tendency to criminate them, or subject themselves to a penalty, it being contrary to any principle of Reason and the Laws of England.”100
As Professor Levy notes: ‘When a right becomes so profoundly accepted that it has been hallowed by its association with Magna Carta and has been ranked as one of the common rights of man deriving from the law of nature, it receives genuflection and praise, not critical analysis.”101 Thus, it is not surprising that the colonists or, for that matter, the Framers did not leave behind theoretical explanations and rationales for the right against self-incrimination. But history’s silence on whether the policies underlying the right were to limit government’s power, secure individual dignity, or both cannot be taken as absolute proof that the Framers did not seek to advance all these policies.102
*1476The process of constitutionalizing the right against self-incrimination started with the inclusion of a version of that right in the Virginia Declaration of Rights.103 The right appeared, however, within section eight, which exclusively dealt with the procedural rights of an accused at his own criminal trial.104 Virginia’s formulation of the right was later widely copied by constitution drafters in other states.105 Nonetheless, the majority’s conclusion from this fact that these states therefore viewed the right as a privilege available only to the criminal defendant is erroneous. As Professor Levy demonstrates, extending the right to the criminal defendant at a time when that defendant was not even allowed, in Virginia as well as other states, to testify at his own trial would have been an utterly superfluous action. As a matter of practice, a much broader and more meaningful right was recognized in Virginia around 1776, protecting witnesses from being compelled to testify against their legal interests in judicial proceedings as well as before non-judicial tribunals, and even “shield[ing] witnesses against mere exposure to public obloquy.”106 In fact, state courts never interpreted clauses similar to Virginia’s to apply only to criminal defendants. For example, although Pennsylvania had enacted a self-incrimination clause similar to Virginia’s, seemingly only protecting the accused at his own trial, the state supreme court interpreted that provision as expressing the broader historic maxim that no person is bound to accuse himself. The court held:
It has been objected that the questions propounded to the electors contravene an established principle of law. The maxim is, “Nemo tenetur seipsum accusare (sen prodere).” It is founded on the best policy, and runs through out our whole system of jurisprudence. It is the uniform practice of courts of justice as to witnesses and jurors. It is considered cruel and unjust to propose questions which may tend to criminate the party.... The words “aceu-sare” and “prodere” are general terms, and their sense is not confined to cases where the answers to the questions proposed would induce to the punishment of the party. If they would involve him in shame or reproach, he is under no obligation to answer them.107
Although the self-infamy rule eventually fell into disuse, the right against self-incrimination in the states simply never contracted to a literal application of section eight of the Virginia Declaration of Rights or other state constitutional provisions modeled after it.
More importantly, the right against self-incrimination was not included in the United States Constitution as one of the cluster of procedural rights afforded criminal defendants. While other such procedural rights derived from section eight of the Virginia Declaration were included in the Sixth Amendment, the right against self-incrimina*1477tion was included separately in the Fifth Amendment. James Madison’s initial draft of what eventually became the Bill of Rights in fact included a Self-Incrimination Clause that was as broad as the common-law right ever was: “No person ... shall be compelled to be a witness against himself.”108 Such a broad formulation of the rights clearly aims to preserve individual dignity and privacy, as well as limit the power of government from establishing inquisitional tribunals. The only commentary about the Clause in the first Congress was by a New York Federalist, John Laurence, who stated that it was “a general declaration in some degree contrary to laws passed,” and proposed an amendment to “confine[ it] to criminal cases.”109 The amendment was adopted unanimously, without debate.110 The majority concludes from these scant facts that the Framers therefore “intended [no more than] to protect the integrity of the common-law criminal trial against the adoption of inquisitional tactics by the federal government.”111 Another, equally plausible conclusion is that the Framers merely sought to confine the right not to be compelled to be a witness against oneself to its core purpose of not being compelled to incriminate oneself; that is, the Framers sought to limit the invocation of the right to instances where the potential consequences are criminal, not civil.112 The brief “legislative history” of the Self-Incrimination Clause tells us virtually nothing about its underlying rationale. “By 1776 the principle of the nemo tenetur maxim was simply taken for granted and so deeply accepted that its constitutional expression had the mechanical quality of a ritualistic gesture in favor of a self-evident truth needing no explanation.”113 The majority cannot read in the absence of an explanation a rejection of the individual dignity rationale for that maxim.
The fundamental value that the privilege reflects is intangible, it is true; but so is liberty, and so is man’s immortal soul. A man may be punished, even put to death, by the state; but ... he should not be made to prostrate himself before its majesty. Mea culpa belongs to a man and his God. It is a plea that cannot be exacted from free men by human authority. To require it is to insist that the state is the superior of the individuals who compose it, instead of their instrument.114
Notwithstanding the majority’s historical analysis, the Supreme Court has long recognized the rights-based rationale of the Self-Incrimination Clause. For example, in Mal-loy, the Supreme Court explained: “‘the freedom from unconscionable invasions of privacy [guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment] and the freedom from convictions based upon coerced confessions [guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment] enjoy an “intimate relation” in their perpetuation of “principles of humanity and civil liberty [secured] ... only after years of struggle.” ’ ”115 The *1478Court, thus, “repudiated the Twining concept of the privilege as a mere rule of evidence ‘best defended not as an unchangeable principle of universal justice, but as a law proved by experience to be expedient.’ ”116 In Murphy, the Court stated that the right against self-incrimination reflects, among other policies, “our respect for the inviolability of the human personality and of the right of each individual ‘to a private enclave where he may lead a private life.’ ”117 It then held that the privilege must be applied across state-federal lines because, otherwise, its policies would be defeated.118 Relying on Murphy ’s enumeration of the policies underlying the privilege against self-incrimination, the Court in Kastigar acknowledged that “[t]he privilege reflects a complex of our fundamental values and aspirations, and marks an important advance in the development of our liberty.”119 As recently as 1990, the Court reaffirmed that “[a]t its core, the privilege reflects our fierce ‘unwillingness to subject those suspected of crime to the cruel trilem-ma of self-accusation, perjury or contempt.’ ”120
In short, the majority’s attempt to ascribe a singular policy to the Self-Incrimination Clause, and then to argue that the Clause does not apply in this ease because such application does not advance the policy, must be rejected, as the Court admonished.121 The majority’s appeal to the historic circumstances surrounding the development of the right against self-incrimination is unpersuasive and contradicted by the Supreme Court’s own discussions of this issue.
E. Practical Considerations
Although the majority does not base its decision on the alleged negative repercussions to domestic law enforcement of a rule applying the right against self-incrimination to a witness who fears foreign prosecution, it contends that these repercussions would be substantial. Two sister circuits have found *1479these repercussions to be potentially so substantial that they grounded their denial of the right to a witness who fears foreign prosecution largely on these alleged repercussions.122 The majority formulates the following hypothetical:
Assume, for example, that the sale and distribution of cocaine is illegal in the nation of Ames. A citizen of Ames visits the United States on a temporary visa. She is arrested in Miami International Airport after police find five kilograms of cocaine in her luggage. The prosecution offers her immunity [from domestic prosecution] in exchange for testimony about three leaders of a drug ring operating in Southern Florida.123
The suspect in that hypothetical could still refuse to testify because of her fear of prosecution in Ames, thus frustrating the efforts of domestic law enforcement, according to the majority. The majority is wise not to have relied on this rationale for denying Gecas the right against self-incrimination. For, as one thoughtful district court judge has said:
While this Court appreciates the potential burdens that expansion of the privilege might place on law enforcement officials, it cannot abrogate a right solely on this ground. In fact, the Bill of Rights as a whole stands for the proposition that the rights of the individual must, in constitutionally defined circumstances, be preeminent, even when those rights may entail hardship to law enforcement personnel.124
Moreover, the majority’s assessment is correct, but only to a point. A fear of foreign prosecution is substantial enough to justify invocation of the right against self-incrimination only if there is a reasonable possibility that the suspect will be apprehended by the foreign government in question. This could happen in one of two ways: either the suspect voluntarily travels to Ames; or the government delivers her to Ames authorities, through deportation or extradition.125 *1480Any restriction on the suspect’s ability to travel resulting from being compelled to testify is not the type of consequence from which the privilege shields a witness.126 Therefore, the only legitimate fear that the suspect would have in the majority’s hypothetical stems from the government’s actions of deporting or extraditing her to Ames. These are actions that are completely within the control of the government. Therefore, the government has the ability to render insubstantial the suspect’s fear of foreign prosecution by agreeing not to deport or extradite her.127 This is, perhaps, a high price to pay in exchange for the suspect’s testimony. But that is the disability that the Constitution imposes on our government.128 In other words, the Self-Inerimi-*1481nation Clause in the majority’s hypothetical does not paralyze domestic law enforcement; it imposes costs on it, just as it does in every instance the government is willing to grant immunity to a witness.129
Moreover, while the facts of the majority’s hypothetical may lead some to balk at its possible result, namely that a foreign drug dealer on a temporary visa could frustrate domestic law enforcement efforts, other hypothetical might present much more sympathetic witnesses. For example, instead of a drug dealer on a temporary visa, we can imagine a young American tourist recently returned from Ames and wrongly accused by its authorities of having connections with one of its drug cartels. To the disappointment of the Miami Airport police, no drugs are discovered in the young citizen’s luggage. Nonetheless, convinced that the “intelligence” they received was correct, American authorities insist on questioning the suspect under oath. Immunity from domestic prose-ration is hardly of any value to a suspect who risks extradition to Ames and conviction there on the basis of his answers.130
It cannot be gainsaid that the majority’s decision in this ease opens the door for the use of our courts to compel the testimony of a United States citizen in the service of a foreign sovereign’s prosecution. Even if there were also a valid domestic law enforcement purpose for this testimony,131 it is hard to believe that the Constitution allows such a result. As Judge Rosen remarked upon the historical context for the adoption of the Bill of Rights:
This new nation had just fought a war to be free from domination of the American people by a foreign sovereign. It is difficult to credit that, given this context, the founders of this new government would have countenanced the compulsion of an American’s testimony so that it could be turned over to an English king’s prosecutor for prosecution of that American in *1482England. This is particularly clear to this Court when one considers that, if the prosecution were by an American prosecutor, the testimony certainly could not have been compelled. One can hardly believe that our Founders would have formulated a fundamental right which could be exercised on American soil under the American Constitution and which could not be abridged by an American government but which could be abridged for the benefit of a foreign government or monarch.132
Indeed, the concept that an American citizen’s Fifth Amendment right depends upon whether he is to be subjected to domestic prosecution, with its manifold due process safeguards, or delivered into the hands of a foreign regime, whose judicial processes may or may not comport with the American paradigm of human rights, is repugnant to our nation’s historical protection of individual liberties.
II. WAIVER
The government contends, alternatively, that Gecas waived his Fifth Amendment right with respect to the questions relevant to any statements he made in his visa application, thirty-five years ago. The government relies on Rogers v. United States, in which the Supreme Court held that “where criminating facts have been voluntarily revealed, the privilege cannot be invoked to avoid disclosure of the details.”133 As we have previously held, however, this rule “is generally only applicable when the ‘disclosure of the details’ is being sought in the same proceeding where the initial ‘criminat-ing facts have been voluntarily revealed.’ ”134 Therefore, the government’s waiver argument is tenable only if the visa acquisition process is part of his deportation proceeding. Other than the government’s and a district court’s utterly conelusory statements,135 there is no support for such a proposition.136 In Fortin, we adopted the following rule:
[t]he privilege [against self-incrimination] attaches to the witness in each particular case in which he may be called on to testify, and whether or not he may claim it is to be determined without reference to what he said when testifying as a witness on some other trial, or on a former trial of the same case, and without reference to his declarations at some other time or place.137
If a witness does not waive his privilege in a former trial in the same case, then he surely does not waive it either by completing a visa application thirty-five years before the institution of a deportation proceeding.138 Similarly, a person who completes a visa application does not waive his privilege as to the information contained therein in a deportation proceeding any more than a government contractor waives his privilege as to the information contained in his bid to the government by submitting such a bid, or an involuntary bankrupt waives his privilege in the bankruptcy proceeding by filing a schedule of *1483assets with the court.139 The government’s waiver argument is meritless. Gecas did not waive his constitutional right against self-incrimination by completing a visa application.140
III. CONCLUSION
The facts in this case are as ironic as the legal principle examined is fundamental. Government prosecutors seek potentially incriminating evidence from a thirty-year resident alien who is suspected of war crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime during World War II. The atrocities to which they would link him epitomize the depths to which humankind can descend and exemplify an absolute denial of human dignity. Yet, if the lessons from that tragic episode in history are to teach us anything it must be that the sanctity of the individual citizen must be cherished and protected relative to the power of his government — even the majority in a democratic society.
In the span of human history, the era of Nazi Germany is certainly little more than yesterday. Many of our fathers and grandfathers fought and died to liberate those who survived the holocaust. However, even the participants in that conflict were at a loss to understand how a modern, civilized nation— one that had given the world great composers, artists, musicians, craftsmen, philosophers and theologians — could so totally reject the concept of human dignity. Unless we are blind and deaf to the legacy of the holocaust, we must understand that the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against the government’s intrusion into the inner sanctum of the individual citizen is no mere “prophylactic rule” as suggested by the majority. Rather, it is a right that acknowledges and ordains the sanctity of the individual, insures his dignity and reaffirms the American concept of a government of laws, where the government is subservient to the governed. It is indeed a tragic day when a court of this nation — traditionally the bulwark of individual liberties — abandons two centuries of Constitutional tradition and relegates one of our fundamental rights of citizenship to the stature of a “prophylactic rule.” Therefore, I must respectfully dissent.

. Many other countries with common-law traditions have more or less similar counterparts.

. I especially accept this point of legal history: it is, at least, unclear that — when the Fifth Amendment was being ratified — the law of England concerning the scope of the privilege against self-incrimination included (or in North America, was widely understood to include) incrimination under the laws of another sovereign.
And given the lack of historical evidence to support it, I especially doubt this proposition: that, after years of bloody and costly warfare to gain America’s independence, these newly-independent Americans by ratifying the Fifth Amendment intended, in effect, to give foreign governments — depending on how the foreign governments choose to make certain conduct criminal under their laws and on how aggressive these governments appear to be when seeking to capture fugitives — the power to obstruct investigations conducted by Americans on matters of national importance, such as, whether someone has lied to our government to gain entry into this country.

. Absolute certainty cannot be expected.

. Because the court has addressed the merits of the core constitutional law issue, I have too. I do not reach the government’s waiver argument; but there may be something to it. I am skeptical about the idea that a man who gains entry into this country by making representations of fact to our government has a right to decline later— even years later — to answer questions about whether those "facts” were false. No American compelled Mr. Gecas to seek to come here; he voluntarily undertook that process; and he was not silent about what he did during the war years. I also think the waiver argument is strengthened substantially by the fact that the government has special rights and powers when it comes to protecting America’s borders and by the fact that the subject of Mr. Gecas's sworn representations dealt directly with whether he would be allowed to cross those borders.

. In this dissent, I refer interchangeably to the constitutional right in question as the "right against self-incrimination,” the "privilege against self-incrimination,” or the "Fifth Amendment right.” I also refer to the constitutional provision that embodies this right as, alternatively, the "Self-Incrimination Clause” and the “Fifth Amendment.” The Fifth Amendment provides: "No person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” U.S. Const, amend. V, cl. 2.

. I refer to the government that forces a witness to testify as the "compelling sovereign.” The "using sovereign” is the government that then employs the testimony or the evidence derived therefrom to prosecute the witness.

. 378 U.S. 52, 84 S.Ct. 1594, 12 L.Ed.2d 678 (1964).

. Abe Fortas, The Fifth Amendment: Nemo Tene-tur Prodere Seipsum, Cleveland Bar Association, The Journal, XXV, Apr. 1954, at 91, 99-100.

. Two sister circuit courts agree, although their reasoning is not nearly as well developed as that of the majority’s. See United States v. (Under Seal), 794 F.2d 920, 926 (4th Cir.) [hereinafter Araneta ], cert. denied sub nom. Araneta v. United States, 479 U.S. 924, 107 S.Ct. 331, 93 L.Ed.2d 303 (1986); In re Parker, 411 F.2d 1067, 1070 (10th Cir.1969), vacated as moot sub nom. Parker v. United States, 397 U.S. 96, 90 S.Ct. 819, 25 L.Ed.2d 81 (1970).

. 119 F.3d 122 (2nd Cir.1997).

. See United States v. Ragauskas, 1995 WL 86640, No. 94 C 2325, (N.D.Ill. Feb. 27, 1995); Moses v. Allard, 779 F.Supp. 857 (E.D.Mich. 1991); Yves Farms, Inc. v. Rickett, 659 F.Supp. 932 (M.D.Ga.1987); Mishima v. United States, 507 F.Supp. 131 (D.Alaska 1981); United States v. Trucis, 89 F.R.D. 671 (E.D.Pa.1981); In re Cardassi, 351 F.Supp. 1080 (D.Conn.1972).

. Murphy v. Waterfront Comm’n, 378 U.S. 52, 54, 84 S.Ct. 1594, 1596, 12 L.Ed.2d 678 (1964).

. Id. at 55, 84 S.Ct. at 1596 (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Kastigar v. United States, 406 U.S. 441, 444, 92 S.Ct. 1653, 1656, 32 L.Ed.2d 212 (1972) ("The privilege reflects a complex of our fundamental values and aspirations, [see Murphy ], and marks an important advance in the development of our liberty.”).

. See Murphy, 378 U.S. at 55, 84 S.Ct. at 1596-97; Balsys, 119 F.3d at 128, Moses, 779 F.Supp. at 873; Bret A. Fausett, Comment, Extending the Self-Incrimination Clause to Persons in Fear of Foreign Prosecution, 20 Vand. J. Transnat'l L. 699, 701-08 (1987) (describing the first rationale as a "systemic rationale” and the second rationale as a "rights-based rationale”).

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 55, 84 S.Ct. at 1596-97.

. In Balsys, the Second Circuit identifies separately the goals of (1) constraining overzealous prosecution and (2) protecting systemic values stemming from " ‘our distrust of self-deprecatory statements[] and our realization that the privilege, while sometimes a shelter to the guilty, is often a protection to the innocent.’ " Balsys, 119 F.3d at 129, (quoting Murphy, 378 U.S. at 55, 84 S.Ct. at 1597). I group both goals under the systemic rationale of the privilege.

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 55, 84 S.Ct. at 1596-97 (citations omitted) (emphasis added).

. The systemic and rights-based rationales of the Fifth Amendment privilege are not hermetically sealed from each other. The systemic rationale, which essentially ensures that our system of criminal justice is fair, also serves the end of human dignity by protecting the individual from an overbearing government. Conversely, the rights-based rationale also guarantees that the system is fair — or at least perceived to be fair, thereby gamering the trust and confidence of the governed — and thus furthering systemic ends. Therefore, at least in the usual case of an individual who refuses to answer for fear of domestic prosecution, the two rationales reinforce each other and merge to a certain extent. Nonetheless, the distinction between these two rationales is necessary because they lead to two different conceptions of the Fifth Amendment: The first leads to a view of the Fifth Amendment that is "instrumental rather than intrinsic.” David Dol-*1461inko. Is There a Rationale for the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination?, 33 UCLA L.Rev. 1063, 1090 (1986). The rights-based rationale, by contrast, leads to a view of the Fifth Amendment "as an expression of respect for human rights, dignity, or individuality and thus as intrinsically valuable.” Id. As one commentator cynically noted, "[w]hile the Court's opinion in Murphy certainly may offer guidance, lower courts often manipulate the various purposes of the privilege in order to suit their ends.” Fausett, supra note 10, at 707-08 (footnote omitted). I candidly admit that both opinions in this case follow that route: the majority stresses the systemic rationale of the privilege, while I stress the rights-based rationale. The difference, however, is that the majority has no choice but to eradicate the rights-based rationale for the privilege in order to reach its conclusion that an accused who has a fear of foreign prosecution cannot invoke the right against self-incrimination; while the result that I reach accommodates both the rights-based rationale and the systemic rationale. In other words, the majority defeats one of the purposes of the privilege, contrary to Murphy's teaching.

. Pillsbury Co. v. Conboy, 459 U.S. 248, 262, 103 S.Ct. 608, 616, 74 L.Ed.2d 430 (1983) (holding that a court cannot compel self-incriminating testimony in the absence of a grant of immunity to the witness).

. Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532, 542, 18 S.Ct. 183, 187, 42 L.Ed. 568 (1897) (holding that a court must exclude from evidence a coerced confession).

. See Majority op. at 1429.

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 55, 84 S.Ct. at 1596-97 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted).

. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966).

. 406 U.S. 441, 406 U.S. 441, 92 S.Ct. 1653, 32 L.Ed.2d 212 (1972).

. Id. at 453, 92 S.Ct. at 1661.

. Majority op. at 1428 (quoting Kastigar, 406 U.S. at 453, 92 S.Ct. at 1661).

. 406 U.S. at 453, 92 S.Ct. at 1661 (internal quotation marks omitted) (omission in original) (emphasis added).

. The Court held in Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 84 S.Ct. 1489, 12 L.Ed.2d 653 (1964), that the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is applicable to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 77-79, 84 S.Ct. at 1608-10.

. Kastigar, 406 U.S. at 459, 92 S.Ct. at 1664 (emphasis added).

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 79-80, 84 S.Ct. at 1610.

. Id.

. 161 U.S. 591, 161 U.S. 591, 16 S.Ct. 644, 40 L.Ed. 819 (1896).

. Id. at 597, 16 S.Ct. at 647.

. Remarkably, no member of the Brown Court advanced an argument similar to that of the majority in this case. Four justices dissented from the Court’s decision upholding the statute at issue in Brown. Justice Field did not consider the danger of incrimination under state or foreign law because he would have held that the Fifth Amendment grants the witness a constitutional right to silence. Brown, 161 U.S. at 630, 16 S.Ct. at 653 (Field, J., dissenting). Another three dissenters disagreed with the majority’s conclusion that the Supremacy Clause gives Congress the authority to grant a witness immunity from state as well as federal prosecution. Id. at 623, 16 S.Ct. at 661 (Shiras, J., joined by Gray and White, JJ., dissenting). These justices concluded that the immunity statute at issue in Brown was unconstitutional because it could not remove the danger of a state prosecution on the basis of the compelled testimony. Id. at 622-23, 16 S.Ct. at 660-61.

. Id. at 606-08, 16 S.Ct. at 650-51.

. Id. at 608, 16 S.Ct. at 651 (internal quotation marks omitted).

. 384 U.S. 436, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966).

. New York v. Quarles, 467 U.S. 649, 654, 104 S.Ct. 2626, 2630, 81 L.Ed.2d 550 (1984) (quoting Michigan v. Tucker, 417 U.S. 433, 444, 94 S.Ct. 2357, 2364, 41 L.Ed.2d 182 (1974)) (alterations in original).

. See Miranda, 384 U.S. at 467, 86 S.Ct. at 1624.

. 414 U.S. 70, 414 U.S. 70, 94 S.Ct. 316, 38 L.Ed.2d 274 (1973).

. Id. at 77-78, 94 S.Ct. at 322 (emphasis added) (additional citations omitted); see also Pillsbury Co. v. Conboy, 459 U.S. 248, 262, 103 S.Ct. 608, 616, 74 L.Ed.2d 430 (1983) (holding that a court cannot compel self-incriminating testimony in the absence of a grant of immunity to the witness).

. 142 U.S. 547, 142 U.S. 547, 12 S.Ct. 195, 35 L.Ed. 1110 (1892).

. See id. at 585-86, 12 S.Ct. at 206.

. See, e.g., Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. (6 Cranch) 87, 128, 3 L.Ed. 162 (1810) (Marshall, C.J.) (holding that legislative enactments should not be pronounced unconstitutional unless "[t]he opposition between the constitution and the law [is] such that the judge feels a clear and strong conviction of their incompatibility with each other”).

. 378 U.S. 52, 84 S.Ct. 1594, 12 L.Ed.2d 678 (1964).

. Id. at 79, 84 S.Ct. at 1609.

. Id.

. See Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 6, 84 S.Ct. 1489, 1492, 12 L.Ed.2d 653 (1964).

. Majority op. at 1432 (emphasis removed).

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 54, 84 S.Ct. at 1596.

. Id. at 55-56, 84 S.Ct. at 1597 (internal quotation marks omitted) (citation omitted).

. See supra Part I.A, at [4-8].

. Moses v. Allard, 779 F.Supp. 857, 875 (E.D.Mich.1991).

. See Balsys, 119 F.3d at 130-31, (noting that “OQntemational collaboration in criminal prosecutions has intensified admirably in recent years” and that "what might be called 'cooperative internationalism’ has now begun to parallel the 'cooperative federalism’ described in Murphy").
This case, though ostensibly concerned with no more than the application of United States immigration law, provides a good illustration for the potential extent of international cooperation in criminal matters as well as the potential use (or, perhaps more appropriately, misuse) of the contempt power of a United States court in the service of a foreign sovereign's prosecution. The United States and Lithuania have entered into an agreement which provides that the two governments
agree to cooperate in prosecution of persons who are alleged to have committed war crimes, ... agree to provide mutual legal assistance concerning the prosecution of persons suspected of having committed war crimes, ... will assist each other in the location of witnesses believed to possess relevant information about criminal actions ... during World War II, and agree to intermediate and endeavor to make these witnesses available for the purpose of giving testimony in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Lithuania to authorized representatives of the United States Department of Justice.
Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States Department of Justice and the Office of the Procurator General of the Republic of Lithuania Concerning Cooperation in the Pursuit of War Criminals, Aug. 3, 1992, U.S.-Lithuania [hereinafter "Memorandum of Understanding”], ¶¶ 1-2. According to this document, a United States citizen suspected by Lithuania to have been a war criminal could be required by "authorized representatives” of the Justice Department to answer questions posed by Lithuanian authorities. Under the rule adopted by the majority today, the suspect cannot invoke his right against self-incrimination and the Justice Department could enlist the contempt power of a United States court to force the suspect to testily. Also, under the majority's rule, Lithuania could then seek the suspect's extradition on the basis of testimony compelled by the United States government. Thus, with the cooperation of the United States government, a foreign sovereign could use the contempt power of a court in this country to compel the suspect to incriminate himself. While bringing Nazi war criminals to justice is unquestionably a laudable goal of great legal and moral importance, we cannot allow the importance of the goal to blind us to the demands of the Constitution. Under our Constitution, even suspected Nazi war criminals are innocent until proven guilty and, at least within our territory, are endowed with the same constitutional rights accorded other persons.
Moreover, even if I were to agree that the only policy of the privilege is to preserve the integrity of our criminal justice system by constraining overzealous prosecution, I would hold that the privilege applies to a proceeding that is but a step in a cooperative effort between our government and that of a foreign country to prosecute a crime. See Balsys, 119 F.3d at 135. When our government seeks to deport a person to a country on the very basis that he is suspected of having committed a crime in that country, and for the avowed purpose of bringing that person to justice, our government is as prone to the corrupting influence of overzealous prosecution as it would have been if the alleged crime was a domestic one. Indeed, the behavior of prosecutors from the OSI, the very agency seeking to compel Gecas’ testimony here, in the case of John Demjanjuk provides a vivid example of such corrupting influence. Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant, was denaturalized in 1981 and later extradited to Israel on the basis that he had misrepresented his whereabouts and activities during the war on his applications for entry into and naturalization within the United States. Specifically, the court had found that Demjanjuk was "Ivan the Terrible,” a sadistic prison guard who committed countless atrocities at the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland. See Demjanjuk v. Petrovsky, 10 F.3d 338, 339-40 (6th Cir.1993). He was convicted of this charge in Israel and sentenced to death. After seven years in an Israeli jail, the Supreme Court of Israel overturned his conviction on the basis of new evidence that became available after the breakup of the Soviet Union which showed that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible. Id. at 342. After Demjanjuk’s return to the United States, it became apparent that the OSI had been in posses*1467sion of information tending to exculpate Demjan-juk, and that the OSI failed to disclose that information, during the denaturalization and extradition proceedings. Indeed, the Sixth Circuit reopened the case in which it had denied habeas relief to Demjanjuk and vacated that decision "on the ground that the judgments were wrongly procured as a result of prosecutorial misconduct that constituted fraud on the court.” Id. at 356. The Sixth Circuit noted that "the attitude of the government trial attorneys ... 'at times bordered on gamesmanship,' ” id. at 341 (quoting the Special Master report). The court further rejected the OSI’s argument that its attorneys operated in good faith, stating that the court "do[es] not believe [the attorneys'] personal conviction that they had the right man provided an excuse for recklessly disregarding their obligation to provide [exculpatory] information,” id. at 350, and generally chastised the OSI for "[t]he 'win at any cost’ attitude displayed by” its attorneys, id. at 355. Significantly, the Sixth Circuit considered the issue of whether the Brady rule, requiring disclosure of exculpatory information by the prosecution, see Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963), applies in the denaturalization and extradition proceedings — all technically civil proceedings — against Demjanjuk. The court concluded that Brady should apply in such proceedings where the government seeks to denaturalize or extradite on the basis of alleged criminal activity. Id. at 353. If the purpose of the Fifth Amendment, like that of the Brady rule, is to protect the integrity of the judicial system by restraining overzealous prosecution, then the Fifth Amendment must also apply in such proceedings.
In the instant case, the United States has entered into an agreement with Lithuania to affirmatively assist it in obtaining information regarding suspected Nazi collaborators and to aid it in prosecuting these people. Memorandum of Understanding, supra. The district court has characterized the deportation proceeding against Ge-cas as a de facto extradition. This deportation proceeding against Gecas is part and parcel of an effort to prosecute Gecas for alleged participation in war crimes. Hence, the United States government essentially is both the compelling and the using sovereign. Cf. Balsys, 119 F.3d at 131 (“In the presence of ... facts [very similar to ours], it would be odd indeed to suggest that the United States government does not care about foreign prosecutions and hence that allowing witnesses to invoke the privilege does not discourage governmental overreaching.”); id. at 143 (Meskill, J, concurring in the result) ("[I]n this case the government’s main interest in enforcing its organic laws is in facilitating a foreign prosecution.”). While I recognize that Gecas may be deported to and prosecuted by other countries on the basis of evidence gathered elsewhere, his right to remain silent should be upheld.

. 26 U.S. (1 Pet.) 100, 7 L.Ed. 69 (1828).

. Id. at 104 (emphasis added).

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 60, 84 S.Ct. at 1599.

. 200 U.S. 186, 200 U.S. 186, 26 S.Ct. 212, 50 L.Ed. 433 (1906).

. Id. at 195, 26 S.Ct. at 213.

. Id. (citation omitted). Although the majority undertakes to reinterpret the English cases relied upon by the Murphy Court and in essence argues that Murphy misinterpreted that case law, the majority does not mention the fact that Murphy also relied on Saline Bank and Ballmann. The majority does mention Saline Bank once, stating:
courts can prevent the infliction of criminal penalties based on compelled, testimonial self-incrimination by refusing to force witnesses to testify against their own penal interest. See, e.g., Saline Bank. This prophylactic rule prevents the infliction of criminal penalties on the basis of self-incrimination by keeping the testimony hidden from the opposing party.
Majority op. at 1429-30 (citation and footnote omitted). To the extent that the majority seeks to limit Saline Bank to a permissive rule, allowing— but not necessarily requiring — district courts to "refus[e]” to compel self-incriminating testimony, such a limited interpretation of Saline Bank is inconsistent with the language used by Chief Justice Marshall, as well as the Court’s subsequent interpretation of that case in both Murphy and Ballmann. More recent decisions have also confirmed that Saline Bank stands for a broader proposition than that advanced by the majority in this case. See, e.g., Lefkowitz v. Turley, 414 U.S. 70, 77, 94 S.Ct. 316, 322, 38 L.Ed.2d 274 (1973) (citing Saline Bank as further support for the proposition that ”[t]he object of the Amendment was to insure that a person should not be compelled, when acting as a witness in any investigation, to give testimony which might tend to show that he himself had committed a crime.”) (internal quotation marks omitted).

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 77, 84 S.Ct. at 1608-09.

. The majority summarily dismisses vast portions of the Murphy opinion, in which the Court discussed and adopted the English case law applying the privilege across jurisdictions, as dicta. See Majority op. at 1433-34. The majority’s position is ironic, in light of the majority’s heavy reliance on dicta from another Supreme Court case as the very linchpin of its argument that the Self-Incrimination Clause does not apply to a domestic compelling jurisdiction if the potentially using jurisdiction is not also subject to the Clause. The linchpin of the majority’s argument is that the prohibition on compulsion is merely prophylactic because "a violation of the Self-Incrimination Clause ... occurs only at a witness's own criminal trial." Majority op. at 1428. For this proposition, the majority cites United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 264, 110 S.Ct. 1056, 1060, 108 L.Ed.2d 222 (1990). Verdugo-Urquidez, however, is a case about the Fourth Amendment. The entire discussion of the Fifth amendment in that case consists of the following three introductoiy sentences:
Before analyzing the scope of the Fourth Amendment, we think it significant to note that it operates in a different manner than the Fifth Amendment, which is not at issue in this case. The privilege against self-incrimination guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment is a fundamental trial right of criminal defendants. See [Malloy, 378 U.S. 1, 84 S.Ct. 1489], Although conduct by law enforcement officials prior to trial may ultimately impair that right, a constitutional violation occurs only at trial. [Kastigar, 406 U.S. at 453, 92 S.Ct. at 1661],
Id. (emphasis added). Thus, the Verdugo-Urqui-dez Court’s discussion of the Fifth Amendment is not only dicta, but also merely passing dicta that provides no useful analysis whatsoever.
Moreover, neither Malloy nor ¡Castigar support the extremely broad propositions for which they are cited. Malloy did not limit the application of the privilege to criminal defendants. Rather, it held that “[t]he Fourteenth Amendment secures against state invasion the same privilege that the Fifth Amendment guarantees against federal infringement — the right of a person to remain silent unless he chooses to speak in the unfettered exercise of his own will, and to suffer no penalty ... for such silence.” Malloy, 378 U.S. at 8, 84 *1469S.Ct. at 1493-94 (emphasis added). Decades before, the Supreme Court had made it quite clear that the privilege is not limited to criminal defendants, though it is limited to criminal matters:
It is impossible that the meaning of the constitutional provision can only be that a person shall not be compelled to be a witness against himself in a criminal prosecution against himself. It would doubtless cover such cases; but it is not limited to them. The object was to insure that a person should not be compelled, when acting as a witness in any investigation, to give testimony which might tend to show that he himself had committed a crime. The privilege is limited to criminal matters, but it is as broad as the mischief against which it seeks to guard.
Counselman, 142 U.S. at 562, 12 S.Ct. at 198 (emphasis added). Similarly, the language and reasoning of Kastigar do not support the broad proposition that the right against self-incrimination can only be claimed at a witness's own criminal trial, as I have already discussed. See supra Part I.B, at [8-14].
Once again, I acknowledge that both the majority and this opinion rely, to some extent, on dicta to support our respective positions. Surely, "[djicta can sometimes be useful when it contains a persuasive analysis.” McNely v. Ocala Star-Banner Corp., 99 F.3d 1068, 1077 (11th Cir. 1996), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 1819, 137 L.Ed.2d 1028 (1997). I respectfully submit that the dicta about the Fifth Amendment in three introductory sentences of the Verdugo-Urquidez opinion contains no analysis whatsoever, much less a persuasive analysis. By contrast, the Murphy decision is about the Self-Incrimination Clause. The Murphy Court's discussion of English case law on the application of the privilege against self-incrimination when the danger of incrimination is under a foreign jurisdiction’s law is persuasive because it contains a thorough analysis of this case law as well as an explicit adoption of the rule it represents as the proper construction of the Self-Incrimination Clause. See Murphy, 378 U.S. at 77, 84 S.Ct. at 1608-09 (“In light of the history, policies and purposes of the privdege against self-incrimination, we now accept as correct the construction given the privilege by the English courts and by Chief Justice Marshall and Justice Holmes.”).

. 27 Eng. Rep. 1010 (Ex. 1749).

. See Murphy, 378 U.S. at 58, 84 S.Ct. at 1598.

. Id.

. 28 Eng. Rep. 157 (Ex. 1750).

. See Murphy, 378 U.S. at 58-59, 84 S.Ct. at 1598-99.

. Majority op. at 1433 (quoting Murphy, 378 U.S. at 82 n. 1, 84 S.Ct. at 1619 n. 1 (Harlan, J., concurring in the judgment)).

. See Moses v. Allard, 779 F.Supp. 857, 876 (E.D.Mich.1991).

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 59, 84 S.Ct. at 1599.

. See id. at 60, 84 S.Ct. at 1599. It is worth noting that the Murphy Court did not do so inadvertently or without fully understanding the alleged difference between the English cases and *1470the circumstances in Saline Bank. As the majority’s quote shows, Justice Harlan identified this difference to the Court in his concurrence, but the Court clearly rejected it.

. 3 L.R.-Ch. 79 (Ch.App.1867).

. 61 Eng. Rep. 116 (Ch. 1851).

. See Murphy, 378 U.S. at 60, 84 S.Ct. at 1599.

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 60-61, 84 S.Ct. at 1599-1600 (quoting Willcox, 61 Eng. Rep. at 128) (omission in original); See also id. at 62, 84 S.Ct. at 1600 (noting that McRae limited Willcox to its facts, where " '[The defendants there] did not furnish the least information what the foreign law was upon the subject' [and] ‘it was doubtful whether the Defendants would ever be within the reach of a prosecution’ ” in Sicily) (quoting McRae, 3 L.R.-Ch. at 84-87).

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 63, 84 S.Ct. at 1601.

. Id. at 67, 84 S.Ct. at 1603 (quoting McRae, 3 L.R.-Ch. at 87) (emphasis added).

. Id. at 63, 84 S.Ct. at 1601 (emphasis added).

. Id. at 77, 84 S.Ct. at 1608-09.

. For the same reason, it is of no relevance that Parliament later overruled McRae by statute in 1968. See Majority op. at 1433. First, the Court in Murphy adopted the reasoning and result of McRae as evincing the correct interpretation of the privilege against self-incrimination as embodied in the Fifth Amendment. See Murphy, 378 U.S. at 77, 84 S.Ct. at 1608-09. Because we look for guidance to our Supreme Court’s interpretation of pertinent decisional law, not that of *1471the British Parliament, the majority’s declaration that it "declinefs] to rely on a foreign case that has been overruled,” Majority op. at 1433, is perplexing. Gecas does not ask the court to rely on McRae. He argues, as I do, that it is Murphy 's understanding of McRae that should be followed. Second, Parliament's overruling of McRae provides us with insight into governments’ attitudes toward the right against self-incrimination in contrast to the historic role of our judiciary as the protector of individual rights in this country. The right against self-incrimination, like all rights accorded to the individual in the Constitution, imposes limits on the power of government and, consequently, burdens law enforcement activities to a certain extent. Naturally, government would rather limit the right to a minimum. See, e.g., McCarthy v. Arndstein, 266 U.S. 34, 40, 45 S.Ct. 16, 17, 69 L.Ed. 158 (1924) ("The government insists, broadly, that the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination does not apply in any civil proceeding."); Counselman, 142 U.S. at 562, 12 S.Ct. at 198 ("It is broadly contended on the part of the [government] that a witness is not entitled to plead the privilege of silence, except in a criminal case against himself____"). The difference between England and the United States, of course, is that Parliament can brush aside the McRae rule by legislation, while here our judiciary stands — or at least should stand — in Congress’s way, for the privilege, "which in England was a mere rule of evidence, became clothed in this country with the impregnability of a constitutional enactment.” Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591, 597, 16 S.Ct. 644, 647, 40 L.Ed. 819 (1896).

. See Murphy, 378 U.S. at 70-78, 84 S.Ct. at 1605-08 (overruling United States v. Murdock, 284 U.S. 141, 52 S.Ct. 63, 76 L.Ed. 210 (1931), Feldman v. United States, 322 U.S. 487, 64 S.Ct. 1082, 88 L.Ed. 1408 (1944), and Knapp v. Schweitzer, 357 U.S. 371, 78 S.Ct. 1302, 2 L.Ed.2d 1393 (1958)).

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 73-74, 84 S.Ct. at 1606-07 (describing Feldman).

. Id. at 74, 84 S.Ct. at 1607.

. Id. at 76-77, 84 S.Ct. at 1608 (describing Knapp).

. Id.

. Id. at 70, 84 S.Ct. at 1605 (describing Mur-dock)

. Id. at 72, 84 S.Ct. at 1606.

. Id. at 73, 84 S.Ct. at 1606; see also Balsys, 119 F.3d at 127, (noting that, because Murphy held that Murdock was wrongly decided, the Fourth Circuit's reliance in Araneta on pre-Mur-phy decisions governing the invocation of the privilege in federal court for fear of state prosecution is misplaced).

. Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591, 596, 16 S.Ct. 644, 646, 40 L.Ed. 819 (1896).

.Cf. Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Fifth Amendment 380 (1968) [hereinafter, Levy, Origins] ("In 1707, at the [New York] trial of Francis Makemie, a Presbyterian minister charged with preaching without a license, the defendant voluntarily, indeed, eagerly, answered all questions, however technically incriminating. His successful defense was based on the rights of conscience as protected by the Act of Toleration.'').

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 56 n. 5, 84 S.Ct. at 1597 n. 5 (emphasis added).

. See, e.g., Kevin Urick, The Right Against Compulsory Self-Incrimination in Early American Law, 20 Colum. Hum. Rts. L.Rev. 107, 118 (1988) ("The court noted that the right against self-incrimination represented the law of God, the law of nature, and the law of the land as derived from the Magna Carta.”) (citing The Attorney Gen. v. Mico, 145 Eng. Rep. 419, 420 (1658)).

. Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 277.

. Id. at 299.

. Id. at 330-31.

. Id. at 330.

. Urick, supra note 89, at 118 (quoting Geoffrey Gilbert, The Law of Evidence 99 (1979) (reprint of 1754 edition)) (emphasis removed); Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 327. The self-preservation rationale for the natural law roots of the right against self-incrimination harkens back to ancient Talmudic law, which provided that " 'a man cannot represent himself guilty, or as a transgressor.’ ” See Moses v. Allard, 779 F.Supp. 857, 870 (E.D.Mich.1991) (quoting Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 434). Indeed, some commentators and courts have suggested that the right against self-incrimination in modem Britain and the United States owes its roots to ancient Talmudic law. See id. (citing N. Lamm, The Fifth Amendment and its Equivalent in Jewish Law, 17 Decalogue 1, 12 (1967)); see also Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 458 n. 27, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 1619 n. 27, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966); Garrity v. New Jersey, 385 U.S. 493, 497 n. 5, 87 S.Ct. 616, 619 n. 5, 17 L.Ed.2d 562 (1967). Although Professor Levy found no evidence that the Talmudic references actually influenced the development of the modem right against self-incrimination, he noted that "[t]he Talmudic source of the right ... provided an ancient lineage and a high moral authority for” it. Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 441.

. Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532, 545, 18 S.Ct. 183, 187-88, 42 L.Ed. 568 (1897).

. Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 317-20.

. Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 318 (quoting Treby’s statement in Peter Cook’s trial, State Trials, XIII, 311 at 334-35 (K.B.1969)) (omission in original). See also East India Co. v. Campbell, 27 Eng. Rep. 1010, 1011 (Ex. 1749) (after ruling that fear of criminal prosecution in the courts of India justified invoking the privilege in an English court, the court continued: "But this objection goes farther; for if it only tended to render him infamous, he should not be obliged to answer”) (citations omitted); Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England III, 364 (1765-69) (stating that "no man is to be examined to prove his own infamy”) quoted in Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 318.

. The majority acknowledges in passing the natural law roots of the right against self-incrimination in addition to its function as a limitation on the power of centralized government. Majority op. at 1451. Yet, when the majority notes in the very next paragraph that "[b]y the mid-eighteenth century in England, common-law courts *1475could hold that '[i]t is clearly settled now, that no person is obliged to make a discovery, which will subject him to a disability,’ ” id. at 1451 (quoting Harrison v. Southcote, 1 Atk. 530, 533 (1751)), it merely concludes: "This ‘clearly settled’ principle was a rule of evidence limiting the government’s power to establish inquisitional tribunals,” id. The majority does not explain, however, why this "clearly settled” principle, so expansively embraced by the court, does not also evince a respect for the individual dignity of the person.

. Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 386 (quoting John Lovell).

. Leonard W. Levy, Original Intent and the Framers’ Constitution 265-66 (1988) [hereinafter Levy, Original Intent ].

. Id. at 266.

. Indeed, the Supreme Court has already rebuffed attempts to so limit the scope of the right against self-incrimination. See Murphy, 378 U.S. at 56 n. 5, 84 S.Ct. at 1597 n. 5. The majority’s reliance on histoiy’s silence is not unlike that of the governments's attempt in United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1, 97 S.Ct. 2476, 53 L.Ed.2d 538 (1977), overruled in part on other grounds, California v. Acevedo, 500 U.S. 565, 111 S.Ct. 1982, 114 L.Ed.2d 619 (1991), to limit the scope of the Fourth Amendment Warrant Clause to the specific historical circumstances that gave rise to it. In that case, the government argued that the Framers did not intend the Warrant Clause to prohibit warrantless searches outside the home because that Clause "was adopted primarily, if not exclusively, in response to unjustified intrusions into private homes on the authority of general warrants,” and, moreover, there was no historical evidence whatsoever that the Framers "intended to disturb the established practice of permitting warrantless searches outside the home.” Chadwick, 433 U.S. at 6-7, 97 S.Ct. at 2481. The Supreme Court answered:
Although the searches and seizures which deeply concerned the colonists, and which were foremost in the minds of the Framers, were those involving invasions of the home, it would be a mistake to conclude, as the Government contends, that the Warrant Clause was therefore intended to guard only against intrusions into the home....
... [I]f there is little evidence that the Framers intended the Warrant Clause to operate outside the home, there is no evidence at all that they intended to exclude from protection of the Clause all searches occurring outside the home. The absence of a contemporary outcry against warrantless searches in public places *1476was because, aside from searches incident to arrest, such warrantless searches were not a large issue in colonial America. Thus, silence in the historical record tells us little about the Framers' attitude toward application of the Warrant Clause to [such] search[es]. What we do know is that the Framers were men who focused on the wrongs of that day but who intended the Fourth Amendment to safeguard fundamental values which would far outlast the specific abuses which gave it birth.
Id. at 8-9, 97 S.Ct. at 2482 (footnote omitted). This last observation is as true for the Self-Incrimination Clause as it is for the Warrant Clause.

. Constitution of Virginia, Bill of Rights (1776), reprinted in Sources of Our Liberties 311-12 (Richard L. Perry & John C. Cooper eds., rev. ed.1978).

. Section eight of the Virginia Declaration of Rights provided:
That in all capital or criminal prosecutions a man hath a right to demand the cause and nature of his accusation, to be confronted with the accusers and witnesses, to call for evidence in his favor, and to a speedy trial by an impartial jury of twelve men of his vicinage, without whose unanimous consent he cannot be found guilty; nor can he be compelled to give evidence against himself; that no man be deprived of his liberty, except by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers.

. Levy, Original Intent, supra note 100, at 250-51.

. Id. at 249.

. Respublica v. Gibbs, 3 Yeats 429, 437 (Pa. 1802), quoted in Levy, Original Intent, supra note 100, at 256-57 (emphasis added).

. Sources of Our Liberties, supra note 103, at 422.

. Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 424.

. Id. at 424-25.

. Majority op. at 1456-57.

. Professor Levy suggests that Lawrence used "laws passed” to refer to certain provisions of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which empowered federal courts to compel the production of books or papers that might subject parties to civil liability and that, therefore, the Framers were concerned with "retainfing] the customary equity rule that compelled evidence of civil liability.” Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 425-26 (emphasis added).

. Levy, Origins, supra note 87, at 430.

. Forlas, supra note 4, at 99-100.

. Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 9, 84 S.Ct. 1489, 1494, 12 L.Ed.2d 653 (1964)(quoting Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 656, 81 S.Ct. 1684, 1692, 6 L.Ed.2d 1081 (1961) (quoting Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532, 543-44, 18 S.Ct. 183, 187, 42 L.Ed. 568 (1897))) (emphasis added) (last alteration and omission in original).
The “intimate relation” between the Fourth Amendment's Search and Seizure Clause and the Fifth Amendment’s Self-Incrimination Clause was first recognized by the Supreme Court in Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 633, 6 S.Ct. 524, 534, 29 L.Ed. 746 (1886). This view goes back further, however, to Entick v. Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (K.B.1765), a decision by Lord Camden that predates independence and which “is considered [both in the colonies and the mother country] as one of the landmarks of English liberty.” Boyd, 116 U.S. at 626, 6 S.Ct. at 530. Entick involved the search of plaintiff's house and the seizing of incriminating papers on the authority of a general war*1478rant. The plaintiff sued the king's agents for trespass, and he won. Id. In holding the general warrant search illegal, Lord Camden said: "It is very certain that the law obligeth no man to accuse himself, because the necessary means of compelling self-accusation, falling upon the innocent as well as the guilty, would be both cruel and unjust; and it would seem that search for evidence is disallowed upon the same principle.” Entick, 19 How. St. Tr. at 1073, quoted in Boyd, 116 U.S. at 629, 6 S.Ct. at 532 (emphasis added). The Supreme Court explained:
It is not the breaking of his doors, ... that constitutes the essence of the offense; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty, and private property. ... Breaking into a house and opening boxes and drawers are circumstances of aggravation; but any forcible and compulsory extortion of a man's own testimony, or of his private papers to be used as evidence to convict him of crime, or to forfeit his goods, is within the condemnation of that judgment.
Boyd, 116 U.S. at 630, 6 S.Ct. at 532.
What is most remarkable about Lord Camden's decision, for the purpose of this case, is that it highlights once more that the right against self-incrimination was embedded so strongly in the law by 1765 that Lord Camden sought to invalidate a general warrant search on the basis that it is but a form of compelling self-incriminating evidence. Moreover, the intimate relationship between these two provisions of the Bill of Rights harmonizes with the idea that the Self-Incrimination Clause, like the Fourth Amendment, has individual privacy as one of its core concerns.

. Malloy, 378 U.S. at 9, 84 S.Ct. at 1494 (quoting and overruling Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U.S. 78, 113, 29 S.Ct. 14, 25, 53 L.Ed. 97 (1908)).

. Murphy, 378 U.S. at 55, 84 S.Ct. at 1597 (quoting United States v. Grunewald, 233 F.2d 556, 581-82 (2nd Cir.1956) (Frank, J., dissenting), rev'd, 353 U.S. 391, 77 S.Ct. 963, 1 L.Ed.2d 931 (1957)). See also United States v. Nobles, 422 U.S. 225, 233, 95 S.Ct. 2160, 2167, 45 L.Ed.2d 141 (1975) ("The Fifth Amendment privilege against compulsory self-incrimination ... protects ‘a private inner sanctum of individual feeling and thought and proscribes state intrusion to extract self-condemnation.' ”) (quoting Couch v. United States, 409 U.S. 322, 327, 93 S.Ct. 611, 615, 34 L.Ed.2d 548 (1973)).

. Id.; see Kastigar v. United States, 406 U.S. 441, 456, 92 S.Ct. 1653, 1663, 32 L.Ed.2d 212 (1972) (noting that the holding of Murphy was based on "an examination of the policies and purposes of the privilege”).

. Kastigar, 406 U.S. at 444, 92 S.Ct. at 1656 (citation omitted).

. Pennsylvania v. Muniz, 496 U.S. 582, 596, 110 S.Ct. 2638, 2647, 110 L.Ed.2d 528 (1990) (quoting Doe v. United States, 487 U.S. 201, 212, 108 S.Ct. 2341, 2348, 101 L.Ed.2d 184 (1988)) (internal quotation marks omitted).

. See Murphy, 378 U.S. at 56 n. 5, 84 S.Ct. at 1597 n. 5.

.See United States v. (Under Seal), 794 F.2d 920, 926 (4th Cir.) [hereinafter Araneta], cert. denied sub nom. Araneta v. United States, 479 U.S. 924, 107 S.Ct. 331, 93 L.Ed.2d 303 (1986); In re Parker, 411 F.2d 1067, 1070 (10th Cir.1969) [hereinafter Parker], vacated as moot sub nom. Parker v. United States, 397 U.S. 96, 90 S.Ct. 819, 25 L.Ed.2d 81 (1970).
The Tenth Circuit in Parker posited what one commentator charitably described as a "bizarre and isolated hypothetical.” See Moshe M. Sure-nik, Note, Testimony Incriminating Under the Laws of a Foreign Country — Is There a Right to Remain Silent?, 11 N.Y.U. J. Int’I L. & Pol. 359, 370(1978). According to the Parker court,
[t]he ideology of some nations considers failure itself to be a crime and could provide punishment for the failure, apprehension, or admission of a traitorous saboteur acting for such a nation within the United States. In such a case the words "privilege against self-incrimination,” engraved in our history and law as they are, may turn sour when triggered by the law of a foreign nation.
Parker, 411 F.2d at 1070 (footnote omitted). In addition to the fact that requiring the witness to demonstrate a real and substantial fear of foreign prosecution eliminates the apprehension that a person could manufacture a potential for foreign prosecution or raise this specter solely to frustrate domestic law enforcement, the situation described by the Parker court could never arise because the witness in that case would not be subject to extradition to the foreign country in question; that is, the witness could not prove a real and substantial fear of foreign prosecution. This is so because of the "double criminality” principle embodied in extradition treaties to which the United States is a party, according to which extraditable offenses are either specifically listed in the treaty or, if unlisted, must satisfy the requirement that the alleged offense is considered to be a crime in both the requesting and the requested state. See generally M. Cherif Bas-siouni, International Extradition: United States Law and Practice 388-93 (3d ed.1996); see also Balsys, 119 F.3d 122, 135, (2nd Cir. 1997).

. Majority op. at 1434.

. Moses v. Allard, 779 F.Supp. 857, 882 (E.D.Mich.1991). Another district judge, Jon O. Newman — now Chief Judge of the Second Circuit — said:
Of course, a constitutional privilege does not disappear, nor even lose its normal vitality, simply because its use may hinder law enforcement activities. That is a consequence of nearly all the protections of the Bill of Rights, and a consequence that was originally and ever since deemed justified by the need to protect individual rights
In re Cardassi, 351 F.Supp. 1080, 1086 (D.Conn. 1972).

. See Scott Bovino, Comment, A Systematic Approach to Privilege Against Self-Incrimination Claims When Foreign Prosecution Is Feared, 60 U. Chi. L.Rev. 903, 912 (1993). Bovino also posits that a foreign government could gain custody of a witness by kidnaping. Id. The possibility of a foreign government kidnaping a person *1480from the United States, however, is too remote to be seriously considered.

. See In re Sealed Case, 825 F.2d 494, 497 (D.C.Cir.1987) (The privilege "does not protect against dangers voluntarily assumed.”); Moses, 779 F.Supp. at 867-68 (discussing Supreme Court decisions regarding the "right to travel” and concluding that a burden on such right does not justify invocation of the privilege); cf. Ullmann v. United States, 350 U.S. 422, 430, 76 S.Ct. 497, 502, 100 L.Ed. 511 (1956) (stating that the privilege does not shield a witness from "disabilities ... such as loss of job, expulsion from labor unions, ... passport eligibility, and general public opprobrium”).

. The government apparently has done so in the past. In the course of its investigation of Gecas, the OSI sought the testimony of Antanas Ragauskas, a former Lithuanian national who immigrated to the United States in 1961, under an administrative subpoena. Ragauskas invoked his right against self-incrimination, and the OSI sought to compel his testimony by offering him immunity from prosecution under the Immigration Act on the basis of that testimony. See United States v. Ragauskas, 1995 WL 86640, No. 94 C 2325, (N.D.Ill. Feb. 27, 1995). The court initially enforced the OSI's subpoena. Id. The OSI withdrew the offer before Ragauskas’ deposition, however, and the court upheld Ragauskas’ right to refuse to answer any questions thereafter on the basis of his reasonable fear of prosecution in Lithuania. Id. at *2, *6.
Some have argued that, under current law, it is not clear that a prosecutor has the authority to grant immunity from extradition. See, e.g., Comment, Criminal Law — Self-Incrimination—The Fifth Amendment Protects a Witness Who Refuses to Testify for Fear of Self-Incrimination Under the Laws of a Foreign Jurisdiction. In re Cardassi, 351 F.Supp. 1080 (D.Conn.1972), 5 Rut-Cam. L.J. 146, 161 (1973); but see Geisser v. United States, 513 F.2d 862, 869 n. 11 (5th Cir.l975)(suggesting that, if extradition would violate a person’s constitutional rights, the power of the government to extradite "may well be circumscribed by Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1, 77 S.Ct. 1222, 1 L.Ed.2d 1148 (1957), holding individual constitutional rights superior to the Government’s treaty obligations”). The Secretary of State, however, has the discretion to refuse to extradite a person, even if that person is accused of an extraditable offense. See, e.g., Bassiouni, supra note 122, at 576 & n. 250 (3d ed.1996) (reporting instances where the Secretary of State exercised such discretion). It follows that the government as a whole, through cooperation of the State and Justice departments, could overcome the suspect's fear of being extradited on the basis of her compelled testimony by simply promising not to extradite her. In any case, Congress has the authority to enact a law giving the executive the ability to grant formal immunity from extradition and directing the courts not to certify extraditability on that basis. See generally Balsys, 119 F.3d at 138 (noting that "Congress may change the law of the land by statute, even when doing so is inconsistent with a treaty previously in existence”) (citing Clark v. Allen, 331 U.S. 503, 508-09, 67 S.Ct. 1431, 1434-35, 91 L.Ed. 1633 (1947) and other authority). Because Congress has such authority, the majority’s suggestion that upholding the privilege in this case would somehow compromise our own national sovereignty is erroneous. See id. at 139 n. 16. Responding to the majority’s footnote 15, I would observe that their predicate assumption ("In most cases, these individuals cannot be deported without their testimony;") — -for which no authority is offered — is specious. In the well-documented case of John Demjanjuk (see note 51), he was deported without the use of any of his testimony. Moreover, the government in the investigation of Gecas that gives rise to this case offered immunity to Antanas Ragauskas to testify against Gecas, as noted above. The government has the ability and resources to develop evidence quite apart from requiring the target of an investigation to testify against himself.

. The majority suggests, with apparent alarm, that upholding the privilege in this case would result in a situation where "[fjugitives who flee to the United States would become entitled to a procedural right they lack in their own countries.” Majority op. at 1435. This is true, without a doubt, whether Gecas’ right is upheld or not. Indeed, "[ijugitives who flee to the United States” are entitled to due process of law, see Shaughnessy v. United States, 345 U.S. 206, 212, 73 S.Ct. 625, 629, 97 L.Ed. 956 (1953) (noting that "aliens who have once passed through our gates, even illegally,” are entitled to due process of law), as well as the equal protection of the laws, even if such rights are nonexistent in their own countries. This is our nation’s greatest attribute, not its failing.

. I hasten to add that the consequences of the majority's rule in this case with respect to domestic law enforcement are not much better than those identified in the hypothetical. If it is apparent to the suspect that the United States government intends to use her cooperation to apprehend the local drug leaders, and then ship her back to Ames to be prosecuted on the basis of that same testimony, the suspect simply has no incentive to cooperate. Moreover, depending on the prison conditions in Ames, the suspect might well prefer to end up in a local jail on a charge of contempt, rather than go back to Ames. See Bal-sys, 119 F.3d at 142, (Block, J., with whom Calabresi, J., joins, concurring) ("It simply cannot pragmatically be assumed that when faced with the 'cruel trilemma of self-accusation, perjury or contempt,’ the choice would invariably be self-accusation. Balsys, for example, would obviously choose domestic contempt over foreign execution____”). Finally, considering that the suspect was apprehended in the Miami Airport in possession of a large quantity of cocaine, she is subject to significant criminal penalties in this country. Her cooperation is more likely to come as a result of a plea agreement rather than under . an immunity statute.

. [I]f an accused person be asked to explain his apparent connection with a crime under investigation, the ease with which the questions put to him may assume an inquisitorial character, the temptation to press the witness unduly, to browbeat him if he be timid or reluctant, to push him into a comer, and to entrap him into fatal contradictions,
Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591, 596-97, 16 S.Ct. 644, 646-47, 40 L.Ed. 819 (1896), are some of the reasons that have led to the constitutionalization of the privilege against self-incrimination in the United States.

. If the majority’s decision were to become the law of the land, nothing stands in the way of a treaty, for example, which would require the United States government to compel an American citizen’s answers to questions put to him by foreign prosecutors in the course of an extradition proceeding. And this without the assertion of any domestic law enforcement whatsoever, but in the interest of increased cooperation among the nations in fighting crime. A compelling hypothetical can be formulated here too: An American tourist recently returned from Singapore is accused by Singaporian authorities of having vandalized several cars by spraying graffiti on them, a serious offense in Singapore. The Singaporian government cannot prove his whereabouts during the time of the alleged offense, but has recently signed a new extradition treaty with the United States, which provides for increased cooperation between the two countries in criminal investigations. Under this treaty, the Singaporian government may submit interrogatories to the United States Justice Department, which has the authority to subpoena the suspect and require him to answer the interrogatories. According to the rule adopted by the majority today, nothing precludes the government from demanding answers, however incriminating, and enlisting the contempt power of a federal court to compel them.

. Moses, 779 F.Supp. at 874 n. 24.

. 340 U.S. 367, 373, 71 S.Ct. 438, 442, 95 L.Ed. 344(1951).

. United States v. Fortin, 685 F.2d 1297, 1298 (11th Cir.1982).

. See United States v. Balsys, 918 F.Supp. 588, 600 (E.D.N.Y.1996), rev’d, 119 F.3d 122 (2nd Cir.1997).

. What is a "proceeding” anyway? The government suggests that Gecas’ visa application and entry into the United States, his obtaining a "green card” (i.e., becoming a permanent resident), and the current deportation action are part of the same "immigration proceeding." It seems much more logical to conclude that Gecas has, thus far, been involved in three separate proceedings pertaining to his immigration to and status in the United States. First, a visa proceeding, as a result of which he entered the United States; second, a "green card” proceeding, as a result of which he became a permanent resident; and third, currently, a deportation proceeding, as a result of which he could be deported if he is found to have misrepresented material facts in either previous proceedings.

. Fortin, 685 F.2d at 1298-99 (quoting In re Neff, 206 F.2d 149, 152 (3d Cir.1953)) (alterations in original) (emphasis added).

. The passage of time, in and of itself, is significant because "there have been substantial intervening changes in immigration law, in immigration procedures, and in the criminal law of Lithuania, Israel, and the United States.” Balsys, 119 F.3d at 140, see also Poretto v. United States, 196 F.2d 392, 394 (5th Cir.1952) (noting that the passage of time is relevant to the issue of waiver of Fifth Amendment right).

. See, e.g., Arndstein v. McCarthy, 254 U.S. 71, 72, 41 S.Ct. 26, 26, 65 L.Ed. 138 (1920).

. I also note that Gecas did not have any Fifth Amendment rights before he entered the United States. See Shaughnessy v. United States, 345 U.S. 206, 212, 73 S.Ct. 625, 629, 97 L.Ed. 956 (1953). Thus, as the Second Circuit observed in a similar case, "It is problematic, to say the least, to suggest that [Gecas] could have implicitly waived constitutional rights that he did not yet possess.” See Balsys, 119 F.3d at 140.
In our order granting rehearing en banc in this case, we asked the parties to address also the following question: "Whether an alien who putatively acquired his resident status by misrepresenting a material fact should be permitted to invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.” Other than managing to restate its waiver and fear of domestic prosecution arguments in a different form, the government appears to answer this question in the affirmative in its brief. See Brief of Appellee at 37-38 (citing Leng May Ma v. Barber, 357 U.S. 185, 187, 78 S.Ct. 1072, 1073, 2 L.Ed.2d 1246 (1958) (noting that rights and privileges have been extended to aliens "who are within the United States after an entry irrespective of its legality”); Jean v. Nelson, 121 F.2d 957, 967-68 (11th Cir. 1984) (en banc) (same), aff'd on other grounds, 472 U.S. 846, 105 S.Ct. 2992, 86 L.Ed.2d 664 (1985)). Clearly Gecas is a "person” within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment, whether he misrepresented facts on his visa application or not. Moreover, considering that the purpose of this deportation proceeding is to deport Gecas if he gained entry to the United States by misrepresenting material facts on his visa application, the argument that he cannot assert his constitutional right because he allegedly misrepresented such facts must fail because of its hopeless circularity.