In re Banks

In In re Banks (1971) 4 Cal.3d 337, the California Supreme Court held that the Griffin v. California (1965) and People v. Cockrell (1965) rationale precluded use of a defendant's silence in the face of accusations as adoptive admissions of guilt where the accusations were made by a police officer in the context of a search of the defendant's person at the scene of the crime. In Banks the defendant was in a liquor store when police officers entered and the clerk told them the defendant had been acting suspiciously. The police officers told the clerk there had been some liquor store robberies that evening, and one of them told the defendant that he fit the robber's description and then began to search him. The defendant was silent during the few moments it took the officer to extract money from his pockets, and then protested he had worked for the money. At trial, the prosecutor commented on the defendant's silence; and in addition the trial court questioned the officer regarding his silence. The People argued in Banks that Cockrell should be limited to the "accusatory stage" of police investigations but the court, while expressing no opinion as to that argument, found that even if Cockrell were so limited it would apply to the facts of that case. "The accusatory stage is certainly reached 'after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom of action in any significant way.' Petitioner may not have been formally arrested at the moment the police began to search him, but had been significantly deprived of his freedom of action." (4 Cal.3d at p. 352.)