Do you feel that the 4th amendment should protect them? Or perhaps a new amendment should be written to protect them and abolish power of subpoena?
I’m slightly biased as I ask this. I feel that the mind is “sacred” in a sense, that it should be considered a fundamental human right for an individual to be able to preserve privacy over their internally held thoughts and memories, and that the ability of the court to force an individual to speak or disclose part of their mind is a wild overreach of power and an affront to the personal liberty of the innocent.
Let’s be very clear: a witness refusing to testify is a rare occasion. Why? Witnesses usually only get called if a party thinks they’re worth the hassle. So things like this are usually avoided. Also there’s only a few reasons to refuse to testify:
Basically the only way you can get in trouble is if you distrust the legal process / the police, you can not raise 5th amendment issues or there is an immunity deal that applies.
Currently you are only able to issue contempt charges, and that’s about it, and that stuff is also very much limited considering relevant case law.
I think it’s like a day to a month in jail.
Let’s also make clear that there is currently a court case going on against young thug, where basically the whole law community is mad at the previous judge (which has been overruled by the supreme Court in an emergency motion; the equivalent to a royal “you fucked up”), and there’s still an endless list of issues. A lot of issues surround a witness who has been lying his ass off and said as much in open court, but who has been part of highly improper ex parte communications and other shenanigans which basically aimed at intimidating him into testifying against young thug.
I bring this up because although there’s a lot of publicity, this is not how it usually works, and this is a bad reference, so I don’t want people to draw from this case.
Back to your question, the penalty, which I again think is about a day to a month in prison. I think it’s a bad thing that you can throw people in jail for this shit, but I also think it’s the best thing there is right now. Court does not have the resources nor the time to properly deal with hostile witnesses, and that means they are limited in what they can do.
Also let’s point out again that in any case, such witnesses only exist, when the moving party has made a huge mistake or something slipped through the cracks.
TL;DR I think it’s not a great penalty but it’s the best we have. Also there’s truckloads of context needed to have a very productive debate on this.
Disclaimer: specific cases get weird, because circumstances and jurisdictions are weird, so “it depends” is still the only viable answer to most things, and IANAL.