United States v. Balsys, 524 U.S. 666, 17 (1998)

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682

UNITED STATES v. BALSYS

Opinion of the Court

feature unique to the guarantee against self-incrimination among the several Fifth Amendment privileges. In the absence of waiver, the other such guarantees are purely and simply binding on the government. But under the Self-Incrimination Clause, the government has an option to exchange the stated privilege for an immunity to prosecutorial use of any compelled inculpatory testimony. Kastigar v. United States, 406 U. S., at 448-449. The only condition on the government when it decides to offer immunity in place of the privilege to stay silent is the requirement to provide an immunity as broad as the privilege itself. Id., at 449. After Malloy had held the privilege binding on the state jurisdictions as well as the National Government, it would therefore have been intolerable to allow a prosecutor in one or the other jurisdiction to eliminate the privilege by offering immunity less complete than the privilege's dual jurisdictional reach. Murphy accordingly held that a federal court could not receive testimony compelled by a State in the absence of a statute effectively providing for federal immunity, and it did this by imposing an exclusionary rule prohibiting the National Government "from making any such use of compelled testimony and its fruits," 378 U. S., at 79 (footnote omitted).

This view of Murphy as necessitated by Malloy was adopted in the subsequent case of Kastigar v. United States, supra, at 456, n. 42 ("Reconsideration of the rule that the Fifth Amendment privilege does not protect a witness in one jurisdiction against being compelled to give testimony that could be used to convict him in another jurisdiction was made necessary by the decision in Malloy v. Hogan"). Read this way, Murphy rests upon the same understanding of the Self-Incrimination Clause that Murdock recognized and to which the earlier cases had pointed. Although the Clause serves a variety of interests in one degree or another, see

the States were not deemed fully bound by the privilege against self-incrimination." 378 U. S., at 57, n. 6.

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