Opinion ID: 222737
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: analysis

Text: On appeal, Braziel maintains that the district court erred by denying his motion for a mistrial. We review the district court's denial for an abuse of discretion, United States v. Tanner, 628 F.3d 890, 898 (7th Cir.2010), but we begin by reviewing the court's application of Bruton de novo. See United States v. McGowan, 590 F.3d 446, 453 (7th Cir.2009); United States v. Nash, 482 F.3d 1209, 1218 (10th Cir.2007). After the Supreme Court's further refinement of Bruton in Richardson v. Marsh, 481 U.S. 200, 107 S.Ct. 1702, 95 L.Ed.2d 176 (1987), and Gray v. Maryland, 523 U.S. 185, 118 S.Ct. 1151, 140 L.Ed.2d 294 (1998), it is clear that a redacted confession of a nontestifying co-defendant may be admitted as long as the redaction does not obviously refer to the defendant. This determination, focusing on the minutiae of the substituted word or phrase and surrounding context, is not always easy to make. See Gray, 523 U.S. at 195-96, 118 S.Ct. 1151. A district court's evaluation becomes especially difficult when the defendant's identity can be established through other evidence offered at trial, as here. Statements that despite redaction, obviously refer directly to someone, often obviously the defendant, and which involve inferences that a jury ordinarily could make immediately are prohibited under Bruton. Id. at 196, 118 S.Ct. 1151; see also United States v. Brooks, 125 F.3d 484, 501 (7th Cir.1997) (describing the Richardson Court's distinction between specific testimony identifying the defendant and an inferential incrimination). This case falls close to that subtle line. We have navigated these murky waters in several of our prior cases. In United States v. Stockheimer, 157 F.3d 1082, 1086-87 (7th Cir.1998), we found no Bruton violation where the altered statement did not incriminate the nontestifying defendants by itself. In that case, the government used an open-ended reference (inner circle) that avoided a one-to-one correspondence between the statement and the defendant, even if other evidence at trial incriminated the defendants as those members of the inner circle. See also United States v. Souffront, 338 F.3d 809, 829 (7th Cir.2003) (finding no Bruton violation where there was no one-to-one correspondence between the redacted statement and the defendant). In contrast, a more obvious one-to-one correspondence such as an alias or pseudonym is too transparent to pass muster. For example, in United States v. Hoover, 246 F.3d 1054, 1059 (7th Cir.2001), we concluded that substituting incarcerated leader and unincarcerated leader for the names of the two defendants did not solve the Bruton problems because those were obvious stand-ins for the names of the defendants. The jury in that case heard that one of the two leaders of the gang operated the gang's activities from state prison, while another served as acting leader on the outside. The Hoover court found that incarcerated leader and unincarcerated leader functioned the same way deleted or another similarly obvious indication of alteration would. 246 F.3d at 1059. Those terms so closely resemble Bruton 's unredacted statements that . . . the law must require the same result. Id., quoting Gray, 523 U.S. at 192, 118 S.Ct. 1151. As a general matter, we have recognized that such a delicate determination requires case-by-case consideration rather than a brightline rule. See id. (noting that little evidence is incriminating when viewed in isolation and that to adopt a four-corners rule would defeat the point of Bruton ). Here, we do not find the use of straw buyer in the Thomas confession to be so obvious a reference to Braziel as to violate Bruton. First, unlike an alias or a pseudonym used to disguise a single individual, straw buyer is more similar to an anonymous reference such as another person or an individual. We agree with Braziel that straw buyer is not neutral insofar as it connotes some illicit activity, but the substituted word or phrase need not be neutral. In context, the Thomas statement was describing a transaction with a straw buyer, so using the phrase was not much different from using the buyer or the person. The statement was highly incriminating to Thomas, but his statement was not used to show that Braziel was the buyer. Most important for our analysis, the use of straw buyer did not facially incriminate Braziel as clearly as the terms incarcerated leader and unincarcerated leader did in Hoover. The straw buyer term could refer to anyone. Taken alone, nothing in Thomas' statement as told by Special Agent Kaiser suggests that Braziel was the straw buyer. Second, although a reasonable jury member could have concluded that Braziel was the straw buyer to which Thomas referred by comparing other evidence presented at trial, the evidence required to make that connection was farther removed from the redacted statement than the clear correspondences present in Gray and Hoover. The Supreme Court has distinguished this type of acceptable indirect inference from an unacceptable immediate inference. See Gray, 523 U.S. at 195-96, 118 S.Ct. 1151; Richardson, 481 U.S. at 208, 107 S.Ct. 1702 (reiterating that only those statements that expressly implicate the defendant or are powerfully incriminating trigger Bruton ). Though the case came very close to the Bruton line, the district court did not run afoul of Bruton by admitting the statement and did not abuse its discretion by denying a mistrial.