Before we get into the story, I think people need to understand what it means to plead the 5th amendment.
The way it has been portrayed in movies and television doesn’t give people an accurate understanding of why and when it should be used.
Here is the legal definition and why this is bad for Deshaun Watson because it is a civil case.
The United States Constitution protects every person from having “to be a witness against himself.” This is known as the privilege against self-incrimination, or “pleading the 5th.” The Fifth Amendment privilege extends to statements that would by themselves support conviction of a crime as well as to statements which might furnish a link in the chain of evidence needed to prosecute the individual. A person can assert their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to protect themselves even when no charge has been filed against them.
In criminal cases, you are allowed to “plead the Fifth” and stay completely silent and it cannot be used against you. This is one of the ways that criminal cases are very different from civil cases. In civil cases, such as divorce cases or protective orders, you can still assert your Fifth Amendment privilege if necessary, but the judge or the jury is allowed to assume that “pleading the Fifth” means something bad for you. This is called an adverse inference.
Also, it should be noted once you plead the 5th, you can’t do it on just one question. It is either all or nothing, which is why when Tony Buzbee asked the woman who scheduled Deshaun Watson’s massages if she even knew him, she had to plead the 5th even though everyone knows she knows him.
In Civil cases, as stated above, pleading the 5th is seen as you know information that you rather not say, and instead of lying, you invoke your right to not speak on it. A jury might see this and ponder if you don’t want to answer whatever is being asked is true, and that is bad news for Deshaun Watson.
He needs to settle these Civil cases before they get to trial, or he might lose another entire season dealing with this.
Flip the pages for the excerpt of the deposition provided by Tony Buzbee to Mark Berman of Fox26. They are quite wild.