[sjy]

This doesn’t sound right to me. As you point out, admissions are an exception to the hearsay rule. They are routinely admitted as evidence in cases where the defendant later retracts the admission and pleads not guilty. There is no Fifth Amendment violation or calling of the defendant as a witness for the prosecution.

I have never seen any authority for the view that the Fifth Amendment was intended literally to prevent the accused from being called as a prosecution witness at trial, as opposed to creating a general privilege against self-incrimination. For example, in Brown v. Walker (1896) [1], an early Fifth Amendment case, the Supreme Court said:

> the States, with one accord, made a denial of the right to question an accused person a part of their fundamental law, so that a maxim which, in England, was a mere rule of evidence became clothed in this country with the impregnability of a constitutional enactment.

[1]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/161/591/