Law Commons^™

Improving The Reliability Of Criminal Trials Through Legal Rules That Encourage Defendants To Testify, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

Reflecting a traditional bias against defendants' trial testimony, the modern American criminal justice system, which now recognizes a constitutional right to testify at trial, unabashedly encourages defendants to waive that right and remain silent. As a result, a large percentage of criminal defendants decline to testify, forcing juries to decide the question of the defendant's guilt without ever hearing from the person most knowledgeable on the subject.

This Article contends that the inflated percentage of silent defendants in the American criminal trial system is a needless, self-inflected wound, neither required by the Constitution nor beneficial to the search for truth. …