Under the ACLU interpretation of the constitution that would be a "FACT" which the jury should not be apprised of. Would you agree that the jury should be precluded from knowing that Mr. Tom held his tongue while a little girl was dying in front of him?
The prosecutors ASSUMED that this fact somehow demonstrated Tom’s guilt, when it did no such thing.
They argued it. The jury agreed with their argument. It is a logical conclusion to draw.
Someone who can’t distinguish between evidence and assumption, or who thinks that silence is “as good as a confession”, should be thrown off juries.
The jury is instructed to draw reasonable inferences from the evidence. If he was silent, they were free to draw whatever inference they could from that fact. It is relevant to his demeanor at the time of the accident and is hence, evidence of a guilty conscience.
I will ask you again. Should the jury have been prohibited from knowing this FACT? Or should it have come in as evidence?"
It should have no bearing on the decision of the jury.
How did the policeman not know there were injured parties in the other car?
No.
LOL, no.
Silence can only be considered within context, since it is NOT an act, by definition. You would first have to somehow prove that silence could ONLY mean guilt in specific context in order to invoke it as an act.
Oh yeah, and trash the 5th Amendment, due process, and any possible, conceivable limit on granting infinite power to the government to seize and convict anyone at any time for any reason using silence itself as the proof of their guilt.
This ruling is insane.
His silence was a fact, but was completely irrelevant in terms of being evidence. It was also a fact that Tom did not discuss thousands of other topics. The jury might have been informed of that as well, and drawn assumptions from his silence concerning, for instance, preschool education of Finnish children, or sustainability of the Pacific tuna fishery.
Once again, silence is not a confession. Absence of evidence is not evidence. Juries are supposed to draw reasonable inferences from evidence, true, but not necessarily to “draw whatever inference they could” from the fact of the absence of evidence. That would be like saying that failure to find a murder weapon in someone’s house or car constituted proof that the person had disposed of it.
Anyway, I don’t expect to sway anyone here with facts or logic. Big day tomorrow and plenty to do beforehand, so I’ll wish you a very pleasant evening.