Can a foreigner invoke the fifth amendment? Bob is a non-US citizen and is visiting the USA on a tourist visa. During his visit, he broke a US law. Law enforcement is unaware of that crime. While breaking the law, he is also a witness to some other crime. The circumstances make it such that Bob cannot testify to the second crime without self-incriminating. Can Bob invoke the 5th amendment to avoid self-incrimination?
Short Answer Bob is a non-US citizen and is visiting the USA on a tourist visa. . . . Can Bob invoke the 5th amendment to avoid self-incrimination? Yes. The 5th Amendment is a right applicable to all criminal defendants or potential criminal defendants, not only to U.S. citizens. In Sanchez-Llamas, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed U.S. Supreme Court precedents in place since 1896 holding (among other things) that: A foreign national detained on suspicion of crime, like anyone else in our country, enjoys under our system the protections of the Due Process Clause. Among other things, he is entitled to an attorney, and is protected against compelled self-incrimination. See Wong Wing v. United States, 163 U. S. 228, 238 (1896) (&quot;[A]ll persons within the territory of the United States are entitled to the protection guaranteed by&quot; the Fifth and Sixth Amendments). Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, 548 U.S. 331, 350 (2006). Some Narrow Exceptions To The General Rule Diplomats Immune From Criminal Prosecution This said, the 5th Amendment right not to be forced to incriminate oneself logically might not apply to certain foreign diplomats who are immune to criminal prosecutions in the U.S., since they cannot &quot;self-incriminate&quot; in the sense of making themselves subject to a U.S. criminal prosecution based upon the information that they disclose. But, I'm not aware of any case law addressing that point, only case law addressing other cases where the 5th Amendment right not to self-incriminate did not apply when the person seeking to invoked it was immune from prosecution for the crimes that the defendant might incriminate himself or herself of, for other reasons. Foreign Corporations Also, while the 5th Amendment states that it applies to &quot;all persons&quot;, this is not a part of the constitution in which the definition of a &quot;person&quot; have been extended to apply to corporations and other entities. Compare Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) (holding that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations). Neither domestic corporations nor foreign corporations have a right to not to self-incriminate under the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A corporation is not protected by the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination. Curcio v. United States, 354 U.S. 118, 122 (1957). Why Is This Right Extended To Non-Citizens? The reasoning behind why the 5th Amendment protects foreigners as well as U.S. citizens is different in the case of federal officials and court cases than it is in state and local matters. Why Does This Apply To Non-Citizens In Federal Courts? This is directly true in federal criminal cases as a result of the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (and originally this applied only to federal court cases), which by its terms applies to all &quot;persons&quot;. The 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states (with the pertinent language in bold): No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. Why Does This Apply To Non-Citizens In State And Local Courts? In state and local courts in the U.s., this is true as a result of the 5th Amendment to the Bill of Rights being &quot;incorporated&quot; to apply to state and local governments via the 14th Amendment due process clause of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment which applies to &quot;any person&quot;, rather than the original U.S. Constitution's or the 14th Amendment's privileges and immunities clause which apply only to U.S. citizens. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states (with the pertinent language in bold and in bold and italics, and the 14th Amendment privileges and immunities clause in italics only): All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Article IV, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states (with the privileges and immunities clause in italics and the repealed third clause of Article Iv, Section 2, related to returning fugitive slaves, omitted): The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime. The decision to use the 14th Amendment due process clause rather than the 14th Amendment privileges and immunities clause, was made, in part, because the Slaughter House cases, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1874 before the incorporation doctrine had been developed, narrowly interpreted the privileges and immunities clause as something that applied to only a handful of &quot;rights of federal citizenship.' Could The U.S. Supreme Court Change This Rule? The current Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court can change the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution prospectively, as they did recently and famously, for example, by overruling Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), in its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (June 24, 2022) decision. So, it is also worth noting that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in a dissent in the case Saenz v. Roe (1999), has argued that the U.S. Supreme Court made a mistake to incorporate the Bill of Rights to the states via the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, rather than the 14th Amendment privileges and immunities clause, as a result of the much maligned Slaughter House cases. The Slaughter House cases were decided in a manner that minimized the effect of the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment in a manner that reflected their conservative resistance to the post-Civil War reforms of the Reconstruction era and the Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution (i.e. the 13th to the 15th Amendments). But the Slaughter House cases nonetheless are still good law. This is because this precedent was too settled to be easily undone, and because other means had been developed to serve the purposes it was intended to serve when adopted, by the time that sentiment on the U.S. Supreme Court had changed to accept the demise of slavery, when the U.S. Supreme Court ended the &quot;separate but equal&quot; doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Justice Thomas argued in his dissent in Saenz v. Roe that the Bill of Rights should instead have been incorporated via the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment, and that the Slaughter House cases and the various cases establishing the incorporation doctrine as arising under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment should be overruled. If this had been done, it would have denied non-U.S. citizens in the United States the protections of the U.S. Bill of Rights in state and local courts, since the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment applies only to U.S. citizens. However, despite the minority views of Justice Thomas, this is unlikely to happen, because not enough other U.S. Supreme Court justices have shown any inclination to take this step, even now that Justice Thomas is part of a 6-3 very conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court that has been inclined to reverse other longstanding U.S. Supreme Court precedents. Other Rights Of Non-Citizens Interrogated For Crimes Foreigners also have a right under U.S. treaties to consular assistance, under Section 36 of the Vienna Convention. But, unlike the 5th Amendment right, this right arising under U.S. treaties has only rarely been afforded an exclusionary rule type protection to foreign criminal defendants if it is denied, in the way that 5th and 6th Amendment violations of the rights are foreign criminal defendants are protected. In denying defendants exclusionary rule protections for violations of Section 36 of the Vienna Convention, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, 548 U.S. 331 (2006), which addressed all of these issues, that since most Vienna Convention members to not provide an exclusionary rule remedy (something unique to U.S. law) to violations of this treaty right, that U.S. states were also not compelled to do so.
This is known as a retroactive or ex post facto law. Such laws are explicitly forbidden by the US Constitution (Wikipedia reference), and are generally frowned on in jurisdictions where the rule of law applies, partly because it is difficult to prove criminal intent when your action was not at the time criminal.
Since there is no search or seizure involved in having a driver's license, requiring a person to update their address is not a violation of the 4th Amendment. It is also not "testifying against oneself in a criminal case", so it does not violate the 5th. As has been repeated many times, driving is a privilege and not a right, meaning that there is no fundamental constitutional right to drive. Strict scrutiny would not render the requirement to have a license unconstitutional, and it certainly would not invalidate the requirement to give a correct address and update that address as necessary. There may be issues regarding a requirement to produce identification, but there is no legal precedent for the idea that an ID law law and a federal "must show" statute would violate the 4th (that is not to say that the courts could not find there is such a basis if the question arises, but it has not yet been found). Since there is no national ID law, one can only conjecture what the outcome of judicial review would be, but if such a law survived strict scrutiny, it would be inconceivable that a portion of the law requiring you to keep your address current would fail such scrutiny. A curiosity search would still be barred.
This is a super complex question and no one really knows the answer yet. Orin Kerr is probably the leading scholar on this question, and he generally argues that forced decryption of one's own device is not a Fifth Amendment violation. As I understand it (and oversimplifying by a lot), one key piece of his position is that requiring you to put in your password is a statement about your knowledge of the password itself, not about the contents of the machine into which you are entering it. And because your knowledge of the password for your own devices is presumed, an exception for "foregone conclusions" would leave this compulsion unprotected by the Fifth Amendment. You can read one of his explanations here. The Eleventh Circuit disagreed with that approach, but a California judge recently reached a conclusion similar to Kerr's. This will probably by a question for SCOTUS before too long.
It is allowed to introduce evidence that impeaches the credibility or reliability of a witness, which could include his previous 5 convictions for perjury. This does not constitute &quot;character assassination&quot;, so I'm not sure what you mean by that. A felony conviction can be admissible (assuming he was not exonerated). There are limits; for example, evidence of religious belief would be inadmissible, likewise holding an unpopular political belief. The evidence has to be connected to the witness's honesty.
You can be extradited from Country A to Country B even if you are a citizen of neither. What matters is whether B can convince A to do it, which is typically on the basis of a treaty between them as well as provisions of both country's domestic criminal law. If you committed a crime in B, then fled to A, your nationality is relevant to the extent that: A might not extradite its own citizens, if you are a citizen of A A might have an agreement with C, if you are a citizen of C, that C should have the chance to proscute you instead of B. (This is the Petruhhin doctrine in the case where A and C are EU countries and B is not.) But you do not have to be a national of B in order for it to have jurisdiction over you in B's domestic criminal law - just as if you were still in B, they could arrest you in the normal way. They are thus entitled to request A's authorities to arrest you in A, and transfer you to B. If your alleged crime was not in B, then their claim over you has to be on the basis that their domestic criminal law allows prosecution extraterritorially. This was the case when B was Spain, A was the United Kingdom, and the criminal was former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet; while his status as a former head of state was relevant, as was whether the crimes were extraterritorial offences in the UK as well, his lack of Spanish nationality was not. A more topical example is B being the United States, A the United Kingdom, and the arrestee being Julian Assange, an Australian who is alleged to have committed various crimes under U.S. law (while not necessarily having been present in the U.S. at the time). While all extradition relationships are different, a common thread of the criminal law in general is that what matters is the circumstances at the time of the alleged acts. Retroactively making you a citizen of B may not be satisfactory to A, to the extent that A's criminal law disallows making anything illegal retroactively. The supposed nationality grant by B might trigger provision's of A's domestic extradition law concerning requirements of due process, lack of political interference, and so on, and block the action. But equally, renouncing your citizenship of B does not extinguish B's claim over you for acts you did while you were a citizen of B. This is again a feature of typical criminal law.
In the US, they would not be automatically prosecuted. The prosecutor would have to find out about the testimony, decide to prosecute, and go through all the normal processes they otherwise would, but they have an additional piece of evidence. Per the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution, a witness cannot be forced to answer a question that would incriminate them. If the question was objected to on this ground and the objection overruled, the witness' answer would not be admissible against that witness at trial, and the prosecutor would have to prove the case using other evidence.
Truth is a defense to defamation Bob must prove the truth of his statement if Rob sues - there is a reverse onus for this defense. Because this is a civil trial the burden is balance of probabilities. Provided Bob can prove Rob stole his bike he will win. A conviction for doing so is pretty good (but not necessarily conclusive) evidence. Absent that, Bob would need other evidence. Of course, if Bob has said that Rob was convicted of stealing the bike, he’s going to lose.