Griffin v. California, 380 U.S. 609 (1965), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled, by a 6–2 vote, that it is a violation of a defendant's Fifth Amendment rights for the prosecutor to comment to the jury on the defendant's declining to testify, or for the judge to instruct the jury that such silence is evidence of guilt.

Edward Dean Griffin was convicted of the murder of Essie Mae Hodson before a jury in a California court.

In the morning, a witness saw Griffin, buttoning up his pants, coming out of a very large trash box in an alley about 300 feet from Hodson's apartment.

[3] As the U.S. Supreme Court said in its ruling, the prosecutor in the final argument to the jury "made much of the failure of [Griffin] to testify": Essie Mae is dead.

Justice Harlan concurred "with great reluctance", agreeing with the Court that "within the federal judicial system the Fifth Amendment bars adverse comment by federal prosecutors and judges on a defendant's failure to take the stand in a criminal trial", but writing that this "no-comment" rule was a "non-fundamental" part of the Fifth Amendment, and that he would only apply it to the States because of the previous term's Malloy v. Hogan decision.

(Justice Harlan had dissented from the Malloy decision, writing that the "compelled uniformity" of applying the Fifth Amendment to the States "carries extremely mischievous, if not dangerous, consequences for our federal system".

Also, "the California procedure is not only designed to protect the defendant against unwarranted inferences which might be drawn by an uninformed jury; it is also an attempt by the State to recognize and articulate what it believes to be the natural probative force of certain facts."

Rather, in a breathtaking act of sorcery it simply transformed legislative policy into constitutional command", and that "To my mind, Griffin was a wrong turn – which is not cause enough to overrule it, but is cause enough to resist its extension."

A 1980 article in the Michigan Law Review stated that Griffin occurred "at the peak of [the Supreme Court's] enthusiasm to expand the constitutional protections of criminal defendants", and that it has "impaired the effective operation of the criminal justice system", automatically reversing cases where the defendant's silence is mentioned but being a "complete failure to address the much more common situation in which no comment is made by judge or prosecutor but the jury nonetheless concludes that the defendant is guilty because he has nothing to offer in his own defense.

"[8] Great American Court Cases wrote that the Griffin ruling "preserved the presumption of innocence to which a defendant is constitutionally entitled.