Constitutionally Guaranteed Criminal Defendant's Silence

In Pacers, Inc. v. Superior Court (1984) 162 Cal. App. 3d 686, 690 [208 Cal. Rptr. 743], the Fourth Appellate District held that "where . . . a defendant's silence is constitutionally guaranteed, the court should weigh the parties' competing interests with a view toward accommodating the interests of both parties, if possible. An order staying discovery until expiration of the criminal statute of limitations would allow real parties to prepare their lawsuit while alleviating petitioners' difficult choice between defending either the civil or criminal case." The Pacers court noted that the remedy it provided was "in accord with federal practice where it has been consistently held that when both civil and criminal proceedings arise out of the same or related transactions, an objecting party is generally entitled to a stay of discovery in the civil action until disposition of the criminal matter." ( Pacers, Inc. v. Superior Court, supra, 162 Cal. App. 3d at p. 690.) However, the cases cited by Pacers in support of this observation (Campbell v. Eastland (5th Cir. 1962) 307 F.2d 478; Perry v. McGuire (S.D.N.Y. 1964) 36 F.R.D. 272; Paul Harrigan & Sons, Inc. v. Enterprise Animal Oil Co., Inc. (E.D.Pa. 1953) 14 F.R.D. 333; and National Discount Corp. v. Holzbaugh (E.D.Mich. 1952) 13 F.R.D. 236) involved claims of individual defendants, not of a corporate defendant, as here. Pacers is therefore of little precedential value to the issues involved in this petition. Evidently because corporate Fifth Amendment rights were not an issue in Pacers, the Pacers court did not discuss the three United States Supreme Court cases ( Hale v. Henkel (1906) 201 U.S. 43 [26 S. Ct. 370, 50 L. Ed. 652]; 221 U.S. 361 [31 S. Ct. 538, 55 L. Ed. 771]; United States v. Kordel (1970) 397 U.S. 1 [90 S. Ct. 763, 25 L. Ed. 2d 1]) that demonstrate a federal practice different from that found in Pacers.