Griffin v. California

Griffin v. California
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 9, 1965 Decided April 28, 1965
Full case name	Griffin v. California
Citations	380 U.S. 609 (more) 85 S. Ct. 1229; 14 L. Ed. 2d 106
Case history
Prior	Defendant convicted, California court; affirmed, California Supreme Court.
Subsequent	Subsequent trial ended in a mistrial; third trial found defendant guilty of murder.
Holding
Prosecutor's reference in closing argument to defendant's exercising his right to refuse to testify, and instruction allowing jury to consider it, violate that right.
Court membership
Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · William O. Douglas Tom C. Clark · John M. Harlan II William J. Brennan Jr. · Potter Stewart Byron White · Arthur Goldberg
Case opinions
Majority	Douglas, joined by Black, Clark, Brennan, Goldberg
Concurrence	Harlan
Dissent	Stewart, joined by White
Warren took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. V, by way of XIV

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Griffin v. California

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.^[1]

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.