Cite as: 529 U. S. 61 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
ment right to due process. The District Court denied the petition in an unpublished order. A divided panel of the Second Circuit reversed, holding that the prosecutor's comments violated respondent's Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights. 117 F. 3d 696 (1997), rehearing denied, 159 F. 3d 98 (1998). We granted certiorari. 526 U. S. 1016 (1999).
II
Respondent contends that the prosecutor's comments on his presence and on the ability to fabricate that it afforded him unlawfully burdened his Sixth Amendment right to be present at trial and to be confronted with the witnesses against him, see Illinois v. Allen, 397 U. S. 337 (1970); Pointer v. Texas, 380 U. S. 400 (1965), and his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to testify on his own behalf, see Rock v. Arkansas, 483 U. S. 44 (1987). Attaching the cost of impeachment to the exercise of these rights was, he asserts, unconstitutional.
Respondent's argument boils down to a request that we extend to comments of the type the prosecutor made here the rationale of Griffin v. California, 380 U. S. 609 (1965), which involved comments upon a defendant's refusal to testify. In that case, the trial court instructed the jury that it was free to take the defendant's failure to deny or explain facts within his knowledge as tending to indicate the truth of the prosecution's case. This Court held that such a comment, by "solemniz[ing] the silence of the accused into evidence against him," unconstitutionally "cuts down on the privilege [against self-incrimination] by making its assertion costly." Id., at 614.
We decline to extend Griffin to the present context. As an initial matter, respondent's claims have no historical foundation, neither in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was adopted, nor in 1868 when, according to our jurisprudence, the Fourteenth Amendment extended the strictures of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the States. The process by which
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