686
Opinion of the Court
based on their fear of prosecution in Sicily, for two reasons. 1 Sim. (N. S.), at 329, 61 Eng. Rep., at 128. The first was the court's belief that the privilege speaks only to matters that might be criminal under the laws of England: "The rule relied on by the Defendants, is one which exists merely by virtue of our own municipal law, and must, I think, have reference, exclusively, to matters penal by that law: to matters as to which, if disclosed, the Judge would be able to say, as matter of law, whether it could or could not entail penal consequences." For the second, the court relied on the un-likelihood that the defendants would ever leave England and be subject to Sicilian prosecution.
The Murphy majority nonetheless understood this rule to have been undermined by the subsequent case of United States of America v. McRae, 3 L. R. Ch. 79 (1867). See 378 U. S., at 61. In that suit brought by the United States against McRae in England to recover funds that he had collected there as a Confederate agent during the Civil War, the court recognized the privilege based on McRae's claim that his testimony would incriminate him in the United States. The court distinguished the litigation then before it from King of the Two Sicilies, indicating that though it agreed with the general principles stated by Lord Cran-worth, see 3 L. R. Ch., at 84, he had not needed to lay down the broad proposition that invocation of the privilege was appropriate only with regard to matters penal under England's own law, see id., at 85. The court did not say that the privilege could be invoked in any case involving fear of prosecution under foreign law, however. Instead it noted two distinctions from King of the Two Sicilies, the first being that the "presumed ignorance of the Judge as to foreign law" on which King of the Two Sicilies rested has been "completely removed by the admitted statements upon the pleadings," 3 L. R. Ch., at 85; the second being that McRae presented the unusual circumstance that the party seeking to compel the testimony, the United States, was also the party
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