And as someone who is currently in the middle of studying for the bar, I can say that this ruling runs completely counter to the previous rules. The Court basically took part of a completely different rule covering completely different circumstances (That a person has to specifically invoke their right to silence before the cops have to stop questioning them….that is, someone who simply remains silent can still be questioned but their silence couldn’t be used as evidence against them (until Monday)) and used it to essentially destroy a well-established rule (A defendant’s silence in the face of police questioning is inadmissible in about 99% of possible situations).

It’s the sort of case that people taking the bar in the next year or two will have to put out of their minds, because the rule won’t be included in the exam for at least a few years, and would only serve to confuse anyone if a similar fact pattern turned up in a question. If I face a question with the same facts as the Salinas case, I will answer “inadmissible because the prosecution cannot use the defendant’s silence against him” and I will get an easy point.