The Supreme Court Decided Your Silence Can Be Used Against You

Alexander Abad-Santos 18,797 Views Jun 17, 2013

A nation continues to wait for final word on the Supreme Court's Big Four cases this term — voting rights, affirmative action, DOMA, and Proposition 8 — but the justices' closest decision arrived first on Monday, in a 5-4 ruling on Salinas v. Texas in which the conservative members of the Court and Anthony Kennedy determined that if you remain silent before police read your Miranda rights, that silence can and will be held against you. Here's what that means.

Basically, if you're ever in any trouble with police (no, we don't condone breaking laws) and want to keep your mouth shut, you will need to announce that you're invoking your Fifth Amendment right instead of, you know, just keeping your mouth shut. "Petitioner's Fifth Amendment claim fails because he did not expressly invoke the privilege against self-incrimination in response to the officer's question," reads the opinion from Justice Samuel Alito, which Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts backed. Justices Thomas and Scalia had a concurring opinion while the remaining four Supremes dissented.

The Salinas case revolves around Genovevo Salinas, a man who was convicted of a 1992 murder of two brothers. Salinas was brought in for police questioning in January 1993. According to the dissenting opinion of Justice Breyer, he was called in to "to take photographs and to clear him as [a]suspect" and Salinas was questioned without being read his Miranda rights:

Because he was "free to leave at that time," [App.14], they did not give him Miranda warnings. The police then asked Salinas questions. And Salinas answered until the police asked him whether the shotgun from his home "would match the shells recovered at the scene of the murder [Id., at 17.] At that point Salinas fell silent.

That silence was then used against Salinas in court, and he was eventually convicted. But the bigger question in revisiting this 20-year-old murder case was whether or not prosecutors were allowed to point to that silence, and win a case using Salinas' own silence against him.

You know what's a much more recent wrinkle to the potential precedent effect of today's ruling? A case like that of the younger Boston Marathon suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who reportedly sat through 16 hours of questioning before he was read his Miranda rights. Had Tsarnaev, who was recovering from serious injuries at the time, remained silent during questioning without explicitly invoking his Fifth Amendment, prosecutors could, under the Salinas ruling, now use that silence to their advantage.

It all seems ridiculously terrifying, this idea that in order to claim your Fifth Amendment, you now need to know how to call the on-the-fly legal equivalent of "safesies." Your right to remain silent just got more complicated, and it will require potential criminals to be more informed about their protections and the linguistic details on how to invoke them. "But does it really mean that the suspect must use the exact words 'Fifth Amendment'? How can an individual who is not a lawyer know that these particular words are legally magic?" Breyer wrote.