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''Griffin v. California'', 380 U.S. 609 (1965), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled, by a 6-2 vote, that it is a violation of a defendant's Fifth Amendment rights for the prosecutor to comment to the jury on the defendant's declining to testify, or for the judge to instruct the jury that such silence is evidence of guilt. The ruling specified that this new extension to defendants' Fifth Amendment rights was binding on all States through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This "no-comment rule" had already been binding on the federal government's courts because of an 1878 law. ==Background of the case== Edward Dean Griffin was convicted of the murder of Essie Mae Hodson before a jury in a California court. Griffin had been invited into an apartment shared by Hodson and her boyfriend, Eddie Seay. After going to bed, Seay was awakened by noise; he saw Griffin and Hodson struggling, and Hodson said Griffin had tried to force her to have sex. After Seay locked Griffin outside the apartment, Griffin broke back into the apartment and struck Seay, who ran to a bar for help. Upon returning, Griffin and Hodson were gone. In the morning, a witness saw Griffin, buttoning up his pants, coming out of a very large trash box in an alley about 300 feet from Hodson's apartment. The witness found Hodson in the trash box, bleeding and apparently in shock. She died at a hospital the next day from her injuries. Griffin, who already had multiple felony convictions, did not testify at the trial. As the U.S. Supreme Court said in its ruling, the prosecutor in the final argument to the jury "made much of the failure of () to testify": The judge, in his instructions to the jury, stated that a defendant has a constitutional right not to testify, and that this did not create a presumption of guilt, nor reduce the need for the prosecution to prove its case; but also stated to the jury: This jury instruction was valid under the California Constitution, whose "comment practice" clause in Article I stated at the time, "()n any criminal case, whether the defendant testifies or not, his failure to explain or to deny by his testimony any evidence or facts in the case against him may be commented upon by the court and by counsel, and may be considered by the court or the jury." Griffin was convicted and sentenced to the death penalty. The California Supreme Court affirmed the conviction, and subsequently the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to determine "whether comment on the failure to testify violated the Self-Incrimination Clause of the Fifth Amendment which we made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth in ''Malloy v. Hogan''." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Griffin v. California」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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