Think about why the right against self-incrimination is included in the Fifth Amendment at all. It’s there, entirely obviously, to stop the government from beating confessions out of people. Constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld says it plainly in a Yale Law Journal article: The core Application Understanding of this Clause is well-known: It prohibited the kind of interrogation practice found in certain seventeenth-century English courts such as the Star Chamber, where an individual was placed under oath, asked if he was guilty of a crime, and subject to severe punishment for refusing to
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