Defendants can be forced to give hair samples, blood samples, and other bodily fluids. They can be forced to produce writing samples, and in some cases to give over information such as combinations to safes or the location of bank accounts. These are governed by the rules on searchs and seizures, rather than those governing self-incrimination. Previous Next.
Privilege against Self-Incrimination. In this process, defendants could be forced to incriminate themselves. The two systems of justice had different goals. It was better that the innocent should suffer than the guilty escape. The opposite was true for the accusatorial system of England—it sought to protect the innocent above all else.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a shift in English practice. Secret proceedings and torture became mainstays of the Star Chamber, the court that tried enemies of the state. In theory, the oath ex officio and torture were extraordinary powers required to protect national security, but more often they were used against religious dissenters.
One such case involved John Lilburne, a Puritan arrested for smuggling religious pamphlets into England in But if a man takes this wicked oath, he undoes and destroys himself. The American colonists were well aware of this history of royal abuse when they came to the New World, and they brought with them a firm conviction that no man should be required to testify against or accuse himself. They considered this privilege part of their rights under common law.
In , for example, the Massachusetts Puritans included prohibitions against torture and self-incriminating oaths in their earliest law code, the Body of Liberties, even though the magistrates still sought confessions in religious trials. By the time of the Revolution, these protections were considered to be so essential to liberty that they appeared in the various state constitutions; in , the privilege against self incrimination became part of the Fifth Amendment to the U.
During the nineteenth century, American courts excluded evidence from confessions that had resulted from official violence or trickery. Interrogation was acceptable, however, as was the use of deception and psychological pressure applied by friends, family, or community.
The key was whether the confession was made voluntarily; if not, the evidence was considered unreliable. Courts usually accepted a confession as voluntary unless evidence demonstrated that a law officer used a clear and unmistakable threat, so law officers frequently pushed the bounds of what was acceptable. Their aim was to make defendants admit guilt and to create an efficient system of justice. The U. Supreme Court during this period extended Fifth Amendment protection to civil cases in which testimony might lead to criminal prosecution, but it also rejected a universal or national privilege against self-incrimination.
In Twining v. When he refused to testify on his own behalf at trial, the judge told the jury that it could draw a negative inference from his silence. States were free to set their own standards. For many Americans, concerns for order and national security trumped the rights of individuals to remain silent. Finally in , the Court decided that the privilege against self-incrimination was an essential part of due process as protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby restricting the states as well as the federal government.
But how far did the right extend? No man shall be forced by Torture or confesse any Crime against himselfe nor any other unless it be in some Capitall case where he is first fullie convicted by cleare and suffitient evidence to be guilty, After which if the cause be that of nature, That it is very apparent there be other conspiratours, or confederates with him, Then he may be tortured, yet not with such Tortures as be Barbarous and inhumane.
It clearly bound legal proceedings, but did it apply to investigations and other pretrial actions as well? Two years later, it became clear that it did when the justices reviewed a conviction for rape. Their decision embroiled the Court in the most famous and bitterly criticized confession case in the history of American law.
Around midnight on March 2, , an eighteen-year-old woman closed her refreshment stand at a Phoenix, Arizona, movie theater and walked home. A short distance from her house, a car pulled in front of her, blocking the sidewalk. The driver grabbed her and forced her into the back seat. Tying her hands and feet, he threatened her with a sharp object and drove her into the nearby desert, where he raped her. He dumped her, hysterical and disheveled, near her house, where she lived with her mother and married sister.
Less than two weeks later, the police arrested Ernesto Arturo Miranda, a twenty-three-year-old Mexican American dockworker who lived with his girlfriend in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb.
Miranda was known to the police. He had a record of six arrests and four imprisonments by the time he was eighteen. He also had a history of sexual problems: one of the arrests was for attempted rape; another was for Peeping Tom activities.
When he was brought in for questioning, Miranda was in constitutionally unprotected territory. In , the rights that protected a defendant in the courtroom—the right to remain silent, the right to counsel, the right to confront witnesses, and other protections for the criminally accused—did not extend to the police station. Most people believed law officers needed wide latitude to investigate and prosecute crime.
This view was widely shared in the s. He was alone with the police, without a lawyer. No one kept a record, and memories differed about what occurred. Self-incrimination definition Self-incrimination means to implicate oneself in a crime or exposing oneself to criminal prosecution.
Taking the stand Most often the right against self-incrimination applies to trials. Gideon v. Wainwright: Why is it important? Areas of Practice. Drug Crimes. Sex Crimes.
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