Facts—William Malloy was arrested during a gambling raid in 1959 by police in Hartford, Connecticut. He was convicted and given a suspended sentence. Later a state court held him in contempt for refusing to answer questions on the basis of possible self-incrimination. The state court held that the Fifth Amendment did not apply to state proceedings.
Question—Does the Fourteenth Amendment safeguard the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination?
Decision—Yes.
Reasons—J. Brennan (5–4). The same standards must determine whether the silence of an accused person in either a federal or a state proceeding is justified. “It would be incongruous to have different standards determine the validity of a claim of privilege based on the same feared prosecution, depending on whether the claim was asserted in a state or federal court.”
J. Harlan and J. White argued in dissent that this decision made substantial inroads into the idea of federalism and did not give due deference to decisions by judges as to when an answer might prove to be self-incriminatory.
Note—This decision reversed Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U.S. 78 (1908) and Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46 (1947). The due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment extends the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination to a state offender, as in Murphy v. Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, 378 U.S. 52 (1964), and protects a state witness against self-incrimination under federal as well as state law.