State v. Nelson

(dissenting)—I dissent. Does the law view with such delicacy the sensibilities of a convicted murderer that the prosecuting attorney is forbidden even to examine him as a witness when he believes that the witness, although intending to claim the Fifth Amendment, may give vital evidence? If so, the criminal, in the eyes of the law, now occupies a status superior to that of the millions of hardworking, honest, respectable people who support and sustain this democracy and maintain its courts. The majority grants a new trial, it seems to me, for reasons which, if carried into the mainstream of…