self-incrimination
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 269 U.S. 20 - Agnello v. United States · 1925Most cited · 3,322 citing opinions
Fifth Amendment exclusionary protection
when properly invoked, the Fifth Amendment protects every person from incrimination by the use of evidence obtained through search or seizure made in violation of his rights under the Fourth Amendment.
How the Supreme Court has restated “self-incrimination”
Each Supreme Court definition of “self-incrimination,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “self-incrimination”
Court decisions citing the 3 opinions that defined “self-incrimination” — 6,066 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 3 definitions, chronological · 1910–1925
- ORIGINAL
the 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 communications from him, not an exclusion of his body as evidence when it may be material.
does not exclude body as evidence
A party is privileged from producing the evidence, but not from its production. The transfer by bankruptcy is no different from a transfer by execution of a volume with a confession written on the fly leaf. If the documentary confession comes to a third hand alio intuitu, the use of it in court does not compel the defendant to be a witness against himself.
privilege from producing vs. production