United States v. Hubbell
United States Supreme Court
530 U.S. 27 (2000)
An independent counsel subpoenaed Webster Hubbell (defendant) for documents in eleven broad categories; Hubbell invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege, and a court ordered him to comply after granting immunity to the extent allowed by law. Hubbell produced over 13,000 pages of responsive documents. A grand jury later indicted him for unrelated tax and fraud crimes based on leads derived from those documents, and the district court dismissed the indictment because the evidence derived from Hubbell's immunized, testimonial act of producing the documents. The court of appeals remanded for the government to show reasonable particularity about the documents' existence in advance, and when the government admitted it could not, it entered a plea deal and sought certiorari on the scope of the immunity.
Whether the Fifth Amendment bars the government from compelling a witness to produce documents it cannot describe with reasonable particularity, and whether a grant of immunity for that compelled, testimonial production bars later use of evidence derived from the documents in a criminal prosecution of the witness.