In two separate cases before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, attorneys for the state argued that defendants must invoke their Fifth Amendment rights to keep pre-arrest silence from being mentioned in court.
On September 10, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Molina v. Commonwealth and Adams v. Commonwealth, both of which deal with issues of whether the mention of pre-arrest silence in court violates the defendant's Fifth Amendment right to be free from self-incrimination. The cases had been postponed pending the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Salinas v. Texas, which found that a prosecutor's mention of a defendant's silence before he was arrested or given a Miranda warning did not violate the defendant's Fifth Amendment rights because the defendant did not expressly invoke the Fifth Amendment.
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