United States of America Ex Rel. Johnnie L. Savory v. Michael Lane, Director, Illinois Department of Corrections

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that the use of defendant’s prearrest silence as proof of guilt was unconstitutional
• holding that the defendant’s prearrest, pre- Miranda statement to officers that he did not want to speak to them was protected from use by the prosecution in its case in chief by the Fifth Amendment, but concluding it was harmless error
• holding that the right to remain silent attaches even before arrest and reasoning that, based on the language of the U.S. Constitution, “unlike the right to counsel,” the right to remain silent “attaches before the institution of formal adversary proceedings”
• finding a confrontation clause violation harmless in part because the tainted evidence lacked probative value
• pointing out that impeachment is designed to detect perjury and that a defendant does not have a constitutional right to perjure himself
• summarizing the split in the federal circuits and holding that comment on pre-arrest silence violates Fifth Amendment

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).