In the 1984 case of Tennessee v. Street, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of respondent Lloyd Eldon Street Jr., who had been convicted for first-degree murder and sentenced to death by a Tennessee court. The issue at hand was whether or not his Fifth Amendment rights were violated when he was forced to give self-incriminating testimony during his trial due to fear that failure to do so would result in an adverse inference being drawn from silence on this matter. The Supreme Court held that there was no constitutional violation because any compulsion felt by Street did not stem from governmental action but rather from his own strategic decision-making process regarding how best to defend himself against charges brought forth by the state.

In the dissenting opinion for Tennessee v. Street, Justice Brennan argued that the majority's decision was a departure from established precedent regarding confessions and their use in court. He contended that using a coerced confession as substantive evidence of guilt violated the defendant's constitutional rights under both the Fifth Amendment (protection against self-incrimination) and Fourteenth Amendment (due process). Furthermore, he disagreed with the majority’s view that introducing such a confession to rebut claims of coercion did not violate these rights. In his view, this approach allowed prosecutors to circumvent protections against coerced confessions by simply claiming they were introduced only to counter defense arguments about coercion. This could lead to situations where juries might improperly consider such statements as proof of guilt rather than assessing whether they were indeed coerced or voluntary.