This Essay offers tribute to Professor Colb’s teachings and insights expressed in her writings on the Court’s Miranda and Self-Incrimination Clause rulings. Since the start of the twenty-first century, Professor Colb wrote many blogs on the Court’s Miranda doctrine. Miranda v. Arizona famously held that persons under arrest must be warned of their right to silence and to have counsel’s advice before being subject to interrogation. Generally speaking, Professor Colb was critical of the Court’s results and reasoning—for good reason.
As someone who supports a broad interpretation of the Fifth Amendment, I offer a counterview of Professor Colb’s conception of the privilege by analyzing a case that supports her thesis. I hope to demonstrate that the goal of the Fifth Amendment is more than deterring official brutality and false confessions. I offer a straightforward conception of the privilege: “[t]he object of the [Fifth] Amendment ‘was to insure that a person should not be compelled, when acting as a witness in any investigation, to give testimony which might tend to show that he himself had committed a crime.’” My view of the amendment is harmonious with its text and history. Relying on this understanding of the privilege, this tribute contends that an important segment of the modern Court’s Fifth Amendment doctrine is inconsistent with a basic purpose of the privilege, namely, conferring an individual right that can be invoked whenever official compulsion threatens a substantial risk of self-incrimination.
To read this Article, please click here: Dead Infants and Taking the Fifth.