Last week the US Supreme Court heard Salinas v Texas, which originated in Harris County and pitted one of Harris County's district attorneys against a Stanford law professor.
The NYT describes the case here:
Salinas v. Texas, No. 12-246, addresses a major open question in the court’s Fifth Amendment jurisprudence: May the failure to answer a police officer’s questions before an arrest be used against a defendant at trial?
The Supreme Court has said the amendment’s protection against self-incrimination applies after arrest and at trial. But it has never decided, in the words of a 1980 decision, “whether or under what circumstances pre-arrest silence” in the face of questioning by law enforcement personnel is entitled to protection.
The case arose from the 1992 murders of two brothers, Juan and Hector Garza, in Houston. Among the evidence the police found were discarded shotgun shells.
They questioned Genovevo Salinas, who was said to have attended a party at the Garzas’ apartment. Mr. Salinas answered questions for almost an hour but would not say if a shotgun the police had taken from his home would match the recovered shells.
The question about the shells was the only one Mr. Salinas refused to answer. Instead, a police officer later testified, he “looked down at the floor, shuffled his feet, bit his bottom lip, clinched his hands in his lap, began to tighten up.”
Mr. Salinas was charged with murder after a friend told the police that Mr. Salinas had confessed. The jury deadlocked at his first trial. At a retrial, prosecutors again relied on testimony about the confession and ballistics evidence. They now also emphasized Mr. Salinas’s silence about the shells.
“An innocent person,” one prosecutor told the jury, “is going to say: ‘What are you talking about? I didn’t do that. I wasn’t there.’ He didn’t respond that way. He didn’t say, ‘No, it’s not going to match up.’ ”
Mr. Salinas was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
In urging the justices not to hear the case, prosecutors in Texas said Mr. Salinas had effectively answered the question about the shells through his conduct. In any event, they said, the Fifth Amendment does not apply when “there is no official compulsion to speak.”
For more on the subject:
- ScotusBlog - Salinas v Texas.
- Grits for Breakfast.
- You can find the transcript of the oral argument here.
