文章基本信息

标题：How Silent is the Right to Silence?
本地全文：下载
作者：Katherine Biber
期刊名称：Cultural Studies Review
电子版ISSN：1837-8692
出版年度：2012
卷号：18
期号：3
页码：148-170
语种：English
出版社：University of Technology, Sydney
摘要：A long-held and fundamental principle of our criminal justice system is that people accused of crimes have a right to silence, arising from the presumption of innocence. Rules of evidence try to protect this ‘right’ during trial, by ensuring that juries understand that adverse inferences cannot be drawn from the silence of the accused. Silence, in court, can mean nothing, and we are not to speculate about what might motivate an accused person to remain silent, or what they might have said had they spoken. However, an examination of the jurisprudence in this area shows that the law is often not dealing with actual silence; sometimes when the law refers to the ‘right to silence’, it seems to mean a ‘refusal to hear’. In other instances, there is actual silence, and yet the law refuses to subject that silence to any critical interpretation, insisting that we cannot infer anything from it. While we have learned, from theatre, music, linguistics, religion and psychology, to develop sophisticated means for interpreting silence, the law demands that we set aside these interpretive tools, hearing silence that isn’t there, and inferring nothing about something.
关键词：Manfred Weissensteiner, jurisprudence, criminal trials, right to silence