Opinion ID: 2545831
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Providing the Jury with Redacted Transcripts of the Interrogations

Text: Defendant also claims error in the admission of the redacted transcripts that were provided to the jury when the prosecutor played the recordings of the interrogation sessions during which defendant confessed to the three killings. Defendant asserts that gaping blanks in the text would have alerted jurors to his commission of uncharged crimes. Defendant contends the prosecutor exacerbated the problem when, in response to the trial court's question how he wanted to proceed, stated: It's not up to me, Judge, we have already been through this and we [were] prepared to proceed. What goes on now is up to the Court and counsel. Defendant contends the jurors would have understood this comment to mean that there was something on the tape the defense did not wish the jury to hear. Defendant cites the United States Supreme Court's decision in Gray v. Maryland (1998) 523 U.S. 185, 118 S.Ct. 1151, 140 L.Ed.2d 294 (Gray) to draw an analogy between the redacted transcripts of the recordings of defendant's interrogation sessions and Gray's treatment of redactions in applying the Bruton rule ( Bruton v. United States (1968) 391 U.S. 123, 88 S.Ct. 1620, 20 L.Ed.2d 476). The Bruton rule allows admission in a joint trial of one defendant's confession naming and incriminating another only if all direct and indirect identifications of the nondeclarant defendant are effectively deleted. (Ibid.; see also People v. Aranda (1965) 63 Cal.2d 518, 47 Cal. Rptr. 353, 407 P.2d 265; People v. Johnson (1989) 47 Cal.3d 1194, 1230, 255 Cal.Rptr. 569, 767 P.2d 1047.) We note at the outset that defendant objected to providing the jury with a transcript of the recordings. But after the trial court overruled that objection, defendant did not object to the blank spaces in the transcript text. Thus, he has not preserved this issue for review. ( People v. Earp, supra, 20 Cal.4th at p. 882, 85 Cal. Rptr.2d 857, 978 P.2d 15.) Moreover, the analogy to Gray, supra, 523 U.S. 185, 118 S.Ct. 1151, 140 L.Ed.2d 294, is not well taken. In Gray, the high court rejected, as an insufficient deletion of a jointly tried codefendant's identity, the use of a blank space or the word deleted in the confessing defendant's statement that Me, [blank], and a few other guys [attacked the victim]. ( Gray, supra, 523 U.S. at p. 192, 118 S.Ct. 1151.) The deletion, in context, was plainly a name of a person involved with the confessing defendant in the charged crime; jurors in all likelihood would have filled in the blank space with the name of the nonconfessing codefendant present in court. (Ibid.) Here, the blank portions of the transcript were far more lengthy, extending for several sentences or half a page. The content of the deleted material was not readily discernible. Assuming that the prosecutor's brief comment would have suggested to the jury that defendant was responsible for the deletions, defendant suffered no prejudice. It is not reasonably probable that the jury would have returned verdicts more favorable to defendant had the prosecutor not made the comment.