Fifth Amendment Pros And Cons

The Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution was signed into law on September 25, 1789 and ratified December 15, 1791 (Benjamin Franklin, 2011). The Fifth Amendment establishes rights that can be applied to both criminal and civil sectors of law. The most used protections of the Fifth Amendment are the right to a grand jury, the protection against double jeopardy, the protection against self-incrimination, the protection against testifying against yourself, and you can’t be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. When drafting the Constitution, the Farmers had a series of examples to look to in deciding what to include in the document. A lot of it came from the earliest examples of European prosecution, another example was what happened when they decided to colonize and after the colonization.
The issues concerning the need of the Fifth Amendment arose very early; even before the colonial days. Religion had been prosecuted for hundreds of years in Europe. The earliest sign that the Fifth Amendment would be needed was during the Spanish Inquisition. People accused of going against the church would be forced to testify in front of a
During this time, citizens were accused of being witches and were tired and found guilty without having being able to testify on their behalf. All that was needed to accuse someone of witchcraft was a third-party accusation and that was enough to get them arrested. The members of the jury were not impartial and if one person believed the accused was a witch, that’s all that was needed (Urofsky, 2011). Nineteen people were hung, one man crushed to death because he did not confess to be guilty (Carey, 2012) or not and countless others were locked away in jails where some of them died (Carey, 2012). The farmers used this as a main driving point to ensure that a tragedy like this wouldn’t happen