Hypothetical criminal law question - right to remain silent?

imagine a case where a major criminal has a safe - a very secure, state of the art safe which is practically impenetrable without a code.





the police have reason to suspect the criminal, and to suspect that he has evidence of a major crime in his house... in fact, in the safe. they get a search warrant for the house, but are unable to get into the safe without the criminal telling them the code





in what respect does the search warrant conflict with the suspects right to silence.|||It doesn't. The suspect can still remain silent. The warrant for his property applies to the safe too, so to deny access to it is a breach of the warrant, which in itself could lead to inferences being drawn. The current caution in use since the early 1990s says that you have the right to remain silent "but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention something you later rely on in court."





This failure to co-operate may not indicate any guilt, but it puts a defendant at a disadvantage if he is convicted, because judges give harsher penalties to those who do not fully co-operate from the beginning.|||The suspected criminal has the full right to completely stay silent even if there is a search warrant and may help figure out the case. I don't believe it would conflict, because the same rules ( Maybe not the same rules) would apply if they were to want to search your house. I think they would try anything to open the safe even without the code or get a person who may know how to do it.|||This could go a couple of different ways. First would be since there is no safe that can't be opened they might just bring someone into open it no matter what it took.





The other is because they have a warrant to search the house and it's contents then failure to open the safe would be no different than if there were such a lock on the front door and a judge could pretty much hold the guy in jail for contempt until he cave them the code.|||With a lawful search warrant they can just break into the safe no matter how much damage is done.