# Trammel v. United States

> Supreme Court of the United States · February 27, 1980 · 445 U.S. 40

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9427811

## Case

- **Full name:** Trammel v. United States
- **Court:** Supreme Court of the United States
- **Decided:** February 27, 1980
- **Citations:** 445 U.S. 40; 5 Fed. R. Serv. 737; 100 S. Ct. 906; 63 L. Ed. 2d 186; 1980 U.S. LEXIS 84
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Concurrence by Stewart
- **Judges:** Burger, Brennan, White, Marshall, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist, Stevens, Stewart
- **Cited by:** 1,039 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- **Yellow flag:** Limited by Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jack Lavin and Robin Lavin, 111 F.3d 921 (1997).
- Negative treatments: 1
- Distinguished by: 1
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9427811

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- holding that the rule permitting an accused to bar all adverse spousal testimony cannot stand because the “ancient foundations for so sweeping a privilege have *346 long since disappeared”; and observing that “[w]hen one spouse is willing to testify against the other in a crim…
- holding that unlike the marital communications privilege, which protects information privately disclosed between husband and wife in the confidence of the marital relationship, the spousal testimonial privilege may be asserted by the witness-spouse only
- holding that a fingerprint was nontestimonial evidence and was not protected by the privilege against adverse spousal testimony
- holding that a party seeking a new privilege must overcome a significant burden of establishing that excluding relevant evidence has a public good transcending the normally predominant principle of utilizing all rational means for ascertaining truth
- holding without discussion that fact that witness spouse testified against defendant “after a grant of immunity and assurances of lenient treatment does not render [spouse’s] testimony involuntary,” and citing Borden-kircher

## Opinion text

Mr. Justice Stewart,
concurring in the judgment.
Although agreeing with much of what the Court has to say, I cannot join an opinion that implies that “reason and experience” have worked a vast change since the Hawkins case was decided in 1958. In that case the Court upheld the privilege of a defendant in a criminal case to prevent adverse spousal testimony, in an all-but-unanimous opinion by Mr. Justice Black. Today the Court, in another all-but-unanimous opinion, obliterates that privilege because of the pur-
*54 ported change in perception that “reason and experience” have'wrought.
The fact of the matter is that the Court in this case simply accepts the very same arguments that the Court rejected when the Government first made them in the Hawkins case in 1958. I thought those arguments were valid then, 1 and I think so now.
The Court is correct when it says that “[t]he ancient foundations for so sweeping a privilege have long since disappeared.” Ante, at 52. But those foundations had disappeared well before 1958; their disappearance certainly did not occur in the few years that have elapsed between the Hawkins decision and this one. To paraphrase what Mr. Justice Jackson once said in another context, there is reason to believe that today’s opinion of the Court will be of greater interest to students of human psychology than to students of law. 2
“The rule of evidence we are here asked to re-examine has been called a ‘sentimental relic.’ It was bom of two concepts long since rejected: that a criminal defendant was incompetent to testify in his own case, and that in law husband and wife were one. What thus began as a disqualification of either spouse from testifying at all yielded gradually to the policy of admitting all relevant evidence, until it has now become simply a privilege of the criminal defendant to prevent his spouse from testifying against him.
“Any rule that impedes the discovery of truth in a court of law impedes as well the doing of justice. When such a rule is the product of a con-ceptualism long ago discarded, is universally criticized by scholars, and has been qualified or abandoned in many jurisdictions, it should receive the most careful scrutiny. Surely ‘reason and experience’ require that we do more than indulge in mere assumptions, perhaps naive assumptions, as to the importance of this ancient rule to the interests of domestic tranquillity.” Hawkins v. United States, 358 U. S. 74, 81-82 (concurring opinion) (citations and footnotes omitted).
See Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U. S. 306, 325 (dissenting opinion).

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9427811. Public record. Not legal advice.