SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
No. 22–196
ADAM SAMIA, AKA SAL, AKA ADAM SAMIC, PETITIONER v. UNITED STATES
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT
[June 23, 2023]
Justice Jackson, dissenting.
I join Justice Kagan’s dissent in full, and agree, in particular, with her insight that the majority’s bottom-line view is that “Bruton should go.” Ante, at 10. I am writing to emphasize that most of the force of the Court’s argument (to the extent that it is at all forceful) comes from the majority having improperly reframed the constitutional standard that applies to the admission of incriminating testimonial statements of a codefendant during a joint criminal trial.
Under the majority’s approach, the default rule is that a nontestifying codefendant’s incriminating confession is admissible, so long as it is accompanied by a limiting instruction. Ante, at 6, 9, 17. Thus, for present purposes, the majority repeatedly calls Bruton v. United States, 391 U. S. 123 (1968), a “ ‘narrow exception’ ” to this default rule. Ante, at 9, 12, 15. And the thrust of the majority’s holding is that the so-called Bruton exception is—and must be—narrow: Bruton is a pesky deviation that requires the exclusion of otherwise admissible evidence (hence, the ease with which the majority contemplates dispensing with that precedent).
That approach inverts the constitutional principles that govern this case. Under our well-established Sixth Amendment precedents, the Court’s analysis must, instead, start from the premise that the introduction of Stillwell’s inculpatory confession during the joint trial threatened Samia’s Confrontation Clause rights. The introduction of a “testimonial” statement from an unavailable declarant violates the Confrontation Clause unless the defendant had a prior opportunity for cross-examination. Crawford v. Washington, 541 U. S. 36, 59, 68 (2004). And, here, there is no dispute that Stillwell’s statement to law enforcement was testimonial, that Stillwell was an unavailable declarant, and that Samia had no opportunity to cross-examine Stillwell. Therefore, the default presumption in this case should have been that Stillwell’s confession was not admissible at his and Samia’s joint trial, because the statement implicated Samia on its face, and Samia could not cross-examine the declarant.[1]
When the Government attempted to nonetheless introduce Stillwell’s inculpatory confession notwithstanding Samia’s inability to cross-examine him, it sought an exception from the Confrontation Clause’s exclusion mandate. Before today, this Court had never held that a limiting instruction, combined with a redaction that merely replaces the defendant’s name, sufficiently “cures” the constitutional problem. In Bruton, the Court rejected the idea of an exception entirely—it entertained permitting such an exception in light of a limiting instruction given at trial, but the Court ultimately declined to adopt one. 391 U. S., at 137 (“[I]n the context of a joint trial we cannot accept limiting instructions as an adequate substitute for petitioner’s constitutional right of cross-examination”). Then, in Gray v. Maryland, 523 U. S. 185 (1998), the Government tried again to get an exception to the Confrontation Clause—this time adding an obvious redaction of the defendant’s name in the confession on top of the limiting instruction—but this Court once again rebuffed such efforts. Id., at 188. Indeed, the only prior case in which this Court has permitted an exception to the baseline confrontation rule of exclusion was one in which the confession at issue arguably was not even “against” the defendant in the first place, as it did not incriminate the accused in any way until the defendant herself introduced evidence that rendered the confession inculpatory. Richardson v. Marsh, 481 U. S. 200, 206, 208, 211 (1987).
Collectively, our precedents properly recognize the necessary narrowness of any exception to the default Bruton principle that the Government’s introduction of an inculpatory confession during a joint trial poses a substantial constitutional problem. Not anymore. With today’s ruling, the majority fails to acknowledge what is the default rule and what is the exception. And it thereby sets the stage for considerable erosion of the Confrontation Clause right that Bruton protects.
Properly understood, the Bruton question actually raises two distinct issues: one about whether there is a Confrontation Clause problem in the first place, and a second about potential cures (like redactions and limiting instructions) for that constitutional dilemma. The majority skips over the first question today; its analysis essentially assumes that there is no Sixth Amendment problem in the first place, which then allows for an unwarranted expansion of what should be a narrow exception to the default principle of exclusion. In other words, the Court has now turned our Bruton cases on their head in a manner that risks undermining a core Sixth Amendment right.
- ↑ Contrary to the Government’s suggestion (see Brief for United States 12, 32), a codefendant’s confession implicates a defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights even if it does “not directly accuse [the defendant] of wrongdoing,” but “rather … is inculpatory only when taken together with other evidence,” Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U. S. 305, 313 (2009). That conclusion follows from the text of the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right of the accused to “confron[t]” “witnesses against him” (emphasis added), not just those witnesses who “ ‘facially incriminat[e]’ ” him, contra, ante, at 9–10.