Consciousness of guilt

[2] Deceptive statements or evasive actions made by a defendant after the commission of a crime or other wrongdoing are seen as evidence of a guilty conscience.

[3] Consciousness of guilt law and legal definition:[4] Evidentiary rules allow a prosecutor to introduce testimony that tends to show that the defendant's actions prove he knew he was guilty (at least of something).

Typical psychological defenses exhibited by guilty suspects include denial, rationalisation, minimisation, and projection of blame onto the victim.

A three-justice plurality of the Court, in Salinas v. Texas (2013), held that such silence was admissible where the defendant did not expressly invoke his or her Fifth Amendment rights.

Within the struggles of the main character, the reader sees numerous examples of behavior that demonstrate a suspect's consciousness of guilt: disposing of the evidence, giving false exculpatory statements, fleeing the scene, and displaying an unusually nervous demeanor.

Modern jurisprudence reveals that such behavior is admissible in contemporary criminal trials for the purpose of establishing guilt, highlighting the importance of acute observation of an accused's actions while demonstrating definitively Dostoyevsky's unique insight into the human condition and the criminal mind.Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley describes Macbeth's "consciousness of guilt" as "stronger in him than the consciousness of failure; and it keeps him in a perpetual agony of restlessness, and forbids him simply to droop and pine.