Adamson v. California

Although the Court later overruled Adamson with Griffin v. California (1965), in which it held that the Fourteenth Amendment does not permit prosecutors to call attention to defendants' failure to testify, in Adamson the Court declined--as it continues to decline--to endorse the notion that all parts of the Bill of Rights apply to the states.

After Admiral Dewey Adamson, a career criminal apparently named after the naval hero, was convicted of murder in the first degree in California Superior Court and sentenced to death, he sought a review of his trial from the U.S. Supreme Court. In particular, the appellant challenged provisions of the state constitution and penal code that permitted a state prosecutor to draw a jury's attention to a defendant's failure to deny or explain the evidence presented against him in court. Adamson had not wanted to take the witness stand in his own defense because to do so would subject him to cross-examination about his former crimes that would undermine his credibility and, in all probability, contribute to his conviction. Through his attorney, Adamson argued that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment makes the Fifth Amendment prohibition on such compelled self-incrimination applicable at the state level.

At the time, a debate was raging in the American judicial system about the so-called "incorporation doctrine," that is, the incorporation of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment. As the Fourteenth Amendment extends the concept of due process to the states, the incorporation doctrine was especially significant for criminal defendants, who are customarily tried in state courts. At the time Adamson came before the Court, the justices had adopted, in Palko v. Connecticut (1937), only a philosophy of selective incorporation, whereby only those Bill of Rights guarantees "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" were binding on the states. Citing this precedent, the Court reasoned that because the prosecutor's actions had not resulted in an unfair trial, Adamson's conviction should stand.