Abstract
The landmark United States Supreme Court case, Miranda v. Arizona, protects individuals’ constitutional rights in coercive environments, like custodial interrogations, where law enforcement officers apply immense psychological pressure through specialized techniques. However, subsequent caselaw distorts Miranda’s intent to enable prosecutors to comment on silence. Doing so divorces Miranda from the reason the United States Supreme Court established Miranda warnings in the first place. This subsequent caselaw narrows individuals’ constitutional right against having their silence used against them in later criminal proceedings to imply guilt based on the custodial framework established in Miranda. Salinas v. Texas is one of those subsequent cases which articulated the requirement that, even in non-custodial settings where they have not been advised of their rights, people must explicitly invoke the Fifth Amendment to prevent prosecutors from using silence to imply guilt at a later trial. This analysis unduly narrows the Constitution’s protections against states’ use of silence to imply an individual’s guilt—especially when that individual stood silent as a free, private person. This flawed federal analysis narrows the right to protected silence and places illogical burdens on individuals. Federal precedent is, therefore, misaligned with New Mexico’s legal values on this issue. The New Mexico Constitution, in contrast to the United States Constitution, is an explicit source of privacy rights for individuals. Courts have routinely found that the New Mexico Constitution guarantees heightened privacy protections for criminal defendants. However, New Mexico courts adopted Miranda’s progeny that wrongly narrows individuals’ constitutional right to silence and has created a body of law that green lights the practice of using a defendant’s silence to imply guilt. In 2025, New Mexico Court of Appeals Judge Shammara Henderson called out this troubling state precedent. This comment continues where Judge Henderson’s State v. Trujillo concurrence ends—arguing that New Mexico should depart from federal courts’ departure from Miranda’s promise that individuals will not be incriminated through their choice to stand silent. In this area too, New Mexico should depart from federal precedent to protect individuals’ silence from being used to imply guilt in criminal proceedings.
Recommended Citation
Kayla Herring,
Rejecting Salinas v. Texas’s Catch-22: Towards State Constitutional Protections for Silence in New Mexico,
56
N.M. L. Rev.
425
(2026).
Available at:
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmlr/vol56/iss2/7
