State v. Kroening

The answer to the First question is “No.”

The applicable constitutional provision found in sec. 8, art. I, Wis. Const., is as follows:

“No person . . . shall be compelled in any .criminal case to be a witness against himself. . . .”

In Thornton v. State (1903), 117 Wis. 338, 93 N. W. 1107, a person accused of rape was compelled after his arrest to surrender his shoe to be compared with footprints at the scene of the crime. We said, page 341, that “the prohibition against one’s being compelled to be a witness against himself should not be limited to exclusion of merely oral statements against…