| Your first citation has nothing to do with disclosing combinations. It's a question of whether documents that would be protected by the Fifth Amendment if they were in the clients' possession are likewise protected when they've been transferred to the clients' attorney's possession. SCOTUS ruled that the documents would've been ineligible for Fifth Amendment protection because they are evidentiary, not testimonial, so it didn't matter whether or not the attorneys or the clients physically possessed them. Quoth Justice White from that decision: > Within the limits imposed by the language of the Fifth Amendment, which we
> necessarily observe, the privilege truly serves privacy interests; but the Court has
> never on any ground, personal privacy included, applied the Fifth Amendment to
> prevent the otherwise proper acquisition or use of evidence which, in the Court's
> view, did not involve compelled testimonial self-incrimination of some sort.
The second case also does not involve either the disclosure of combinations or compelled opening of locks. It affirms that compelling a person to sign a document granting banks permission to transmit any account records which may exist to the government does NOT violate the Fifth Amendment because it is not testimonial self-incrimination.The third case appears closer to the mark in that it discusses the way in which produced documentation can be employed to incriminate a witness who produced it, but that case specifically seems to involve the interaction of the statute under which the accused was granted immunity. It also deals with a witness who produced documentation pursuant to a subpoena and a grant of immunity provided in connection with that, not an accused who is the subject of the investigation. I'm not sure where you pulled these citations, but none of them appear to have any relevance to the assertions you've made. Some research seems to indicate that the question of whether a defendant must supply the combination to a safe has never been directly considered by the Supreme Court, though it's been mentioned, tangentially, as a distinct thing from using a key to "open a strongbox", with the implication that disclosing a combination may be protected but opening a safe with a key wouldn't be. This analogy is employed in one place in the decision issued in the third case, but it's only for illustrative effect. I'm sure that in the not-too-distant future we'll see a case about this make it up to the Supreme Court (possibly even this one). My expectation is that SCOTUS will rule that it is proper to compel the defendant to decrypt the disks. |