‘5th Amendment: Shield for Guilty?’

I was dismayed to read (Dec. 5) article, (“U.S. Fifth Amendment: Shield for the Innocent--or Guilty?”) which diminished that same U.S. Constitution which, I expect, your editorial pages will lavishly praise during the oncoming Constitutional Bicentennial year.

Your background article treats but one aspect of the Fifth Amendment as if it is the whole thereof, and its thrust is whether that noble statement hinders or helps in sorting out the innocent from the guilty. It thus mistakes its core issue, which is that forced self-incrimination shall NOT be used to determine innocence or guilt.

The Fifth Amendment requires the government’s police power and its judicial authority to make its case based upon evidence that it finds, other than a confession forced from the lips of a suspect. The Founding Fathers did not include this prohibition casually, “for the sake of fairness” as your article states, but rather to make certain that government would not embellish a sham criminal trial by obtaining a confession from the accused by threat or torture.

But the Fifth Amendment has more than this single aspect. Among other things, it protects a person from being forced to confess a crime, and from being executed, or imprisoned, or from having his property seized without due process of law. It is these protections, more than any other, which marks the distinction between the American experience and life in Nazi, Fascist, Communist, and other dictatorships. These fundamental provisions of the U.S. Constitution should not be treated as if they were technicalities of law, or contemporary political issues to be bandied about in parlor debate by “critics” and “defenders,” as your article would have it.

As the Preamble of the Constitution announces the purpose of this nation, and the articles provide the structure and mechanisms for governing, so the Bill of Rights promulgates its soul. And nothing in the Bill of Rights has greater weight than the Fifth Amendment.

ROBERT VULCAN

Los Angeles