{"id":818,"date":"2021-04-06T22:47:13","date_gmt":"2021-04-07T02:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/in-print\/silence-and-nontestimonial-evidence\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T11:09:32","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T15:09:32","slug":"silence-and-nontestimonial-evidence","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/in-print\/volume-58-number-2-spring-2021\/silence-and-nontestimonial-evidence\/","title":{"rendered":"Silence and Nontestimonial Evidence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No person, the Fifth Amendment promises, \u201cshall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.\u201d What it means \u201cto be a witness\u201d against oneself has been largely settled in American law since at least 1910, when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in <i>United States v. Holt <\/i>that \u201cthe prohibition of compelling a man in a criminal court to be witness against himself is a prohibition of the use of physical or moral compulsion to extort <i>communications <\/i>from him. . . .\u201d From <i>Holt<\/i>, the general principle has been derived that the compulsion of physical, noncommunicative evidence from a defendant\u2014such as a demonstration of the fitting of an article of cloth-ing, a handwriting exemplar, a blood sample, or even documents\u2014does not trigger the protections of the Self-Incrimination Clause because compelling a defendant to produce such evidence does not compel the defendant to be a \u201cwitness.\u201d<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>This principle, however, is neither historically nor logically sound. In fact, when Justice Thurgood Marshall complained in 1973 that he could not \u201caccept the notion that the Government can compel a man to cooperate affirmatively in securing incriminating evidence when that evidence could not be obtained without the cooperation of the suspect,\u201d he was simply reiterating a position with a historical pedigree stretching back to the Framers\u2019 earliest discussion of the language of the Fifth Amendment and to even older caselaw from England concerning the production of documents. The Self-Incrimination Clause bars the admission of compelled <i>evidence<\/i>, testimonial or otherwise. At the time the Fifth Amendment was ratified, there was no semantic difference between \u201cbeing a witness\u201d and \u201cgiving evidence,\u201d and no such difference existed before that time either.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2021\/04\/58-2-Lin-Silence-and-Nontestimonial-Evidence.pdf\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No person, the Fifth Amendment promises, \u201cshall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.\u201d What it means \u201cto be a witness\u201d against oneself has been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2240,"featured_media":0,"parent":907,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"abstract.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":"","_tec_slr_enabled":"","_tec_slr_layout":""},"class_list":["post-818","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"ticketed":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2240"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":848,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/818\/revisions\/848"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/american-criminal-law-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}