Pleading the Fifth Amendment makes more sense than you migjt think

With Trump back in the news big-time recently, some of the weirdness of the American political and legal system are coming up. One such weirdness is the whole idea of "pleading the Fifth Amendment", which has no precise equivalent here in Canada (or anywhere else for that matter).

This has nothing to do with the ongoing shenanigans around the FBI raid on Trump's Florida home, nor the ongoing legal case over his refusal to make his tax returns public, nor any of the myriad other legal snafus he finds himself in. Incidentally, what a way to live a life, constantly fighting legal battles, At one point, Trump whined, in apparently genuine confusion,"Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before". Well, duh, I wonder why not?

This relates to the New York investigation of the Trump Organization's misstatement of the value of assets like golf courses and buildings in order to mislead lenders and tax authorities. Rather than incriminate himself, Trump.chose to "take the Fifth" and just refuse to answer any questions under oath (not that that I would trust him to tell the truth, even under oath). 

Now, to us non-Americans this just seems ridiculous. How can it be possible for someone to just refuse to answer questions in a court of law? Doesn't that make a mockery of the whole process? Isn't it just tantamount to admitting guilt, but saying, "Tough, you can't do anything about it". Well, apparently it's not quite that simple.

Sometimes know as the "right to remain silent" or the "right agsinst self-incrimination", the Fifth Amendment is an integral part of the US Constitution, and it says that a person can not "be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself". You could use this right of you are guilty and don't to make things any worse, or you could use it if you are innocent and don't want to give the prosecution and the jury any ammunition that might convince them of your guilt. You're not supposed to use it just because you don't want to testify, for whatever reason, nefarious ot otherwise (but would you trust Trump to consider such ethical niceties in a court case?)

So, taking the Fifth Amendment is not an implicit admission of guilt. In a criminal case,  jury is specifically not allowed to use a defendant's refusal to testify against them, and is instructed to draw no adverse conclusions from it (in a civil case, however, this does not seem to apply). In practice, there is still a risk that a jury may be subconsciously swayed by such a refusal to tstify, and it does mean that the defendant is not able to put forward their own side of the story, so it should be considered a double-edged sword.

So, I understand the concept, and actually there is a similar clause in Section 13 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In fact, most other countries have some form of the right to remain silentmost other countries have some form of the right to remain silent, although rarely as explicit as the US's Fifth Amendment.