Scott v. California
Decision Date | 05 December 1960 |
Docket Number | M,No. 241,241 |
Parties | Leonard Ewing SCOTT v. CALIFORNIA. isc |
Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
Morris Lavine, for appellant.
Stanley Mosk, Atty. Gen. of California, William E. James, Asst. Atty. Gen., William B. McKesson and Lewis Watnick, for appellee.
The motion to dismiss is granted and the appeal is dismissed. Treating the papers whereon the appeal was taken as a petition for certiorari, certiorari is denied.
The salient facts in this case are related in 176 Cal.App.2d 458, 1 Cal.Rptr. 600. A reading of the report shows that the entire evidence against the defendant was circumstantial. It was not even shown directly that his wife, whom he is now convicted of murdering, is dead. Proof of the corpus delicti, as well as proof of petitioner's criminal agency, was to inferred from his wife's inexplicable disappearance coupled with his unnatural behavior thereafter. A prominent aspect of this unnatural behavior was his silence. At the trial, the petitioner did not take the stand. The trial judge in accord with California law charged the jury as follows:
(Italics added.)
Using a defendant's silence as evidence against him is one way of having him testify against himself. This would not be permitted, we have assumed, in a federal trial by reason of the Fifth Amendment. Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 50, 67 S.Ct. 1672, 91 L.Ed. 1903. That rule, embodied in a federal statute, has much history behind it. See Wilson v. United States, 149 U.S. 60, 13 S.Ct. 765, 37 L.Ed. 650. Its value in protecting the interests of an accused was well stated in Bruno v. United States, 308 U.S. 287, 294, 60 S.Ct. 198, 200, 84 L.Ed. 257, where we said:
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