Opinion ID: 539884
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Admission of recorded statements mentioning other co-conspirators.

Text: 50 Duque argues that the district court erred by allowing the government to introduce tape recorded conversations between Petersen and several other defendants. During those conversations, Petersen and the people he was speaking to referred to Velasquez and Campos, defendants in this case, and Gorny and Bell, who pleaded guilty and were not defendants. These references to Velasquez, Campos, Gorny, and Bell tended to show that they had participated in the conspiracy. 51 Duque claims that by admitting the taped statements without deleting the references to other conspirators, the district court violated his Sixth Amendment right to confrontation. In Bruton v. United States, 391 U.S. 123, 88 S.Ct. 1620, 20 L.Ed.2d 476 (1968), the Supreme Court held that a defendant at a joint trial is deprived of his right to confrontation when the court admits a nontestifying codefendant's confession implicating him in the crime, even if the court instructs the jury to consider the confession only against the codefendant. See also Richardson v. Marsh, 481 U.S. 200, 201-02, 107 S.Ct. 1702, 1704, 95 L.Ed.2d 176 (1987). Although the law normally presumes that jurors will follow instructions to consider evidence only against a codefendant, the Court in Bruton reasoned that the risk the jury will not follow the instruction is too great when the powerfully incriminating extrajudicial statements of a codefendant, who stands accused side-by-side with the defendant, are deliberately spread before the jury in a joint trial.... Bruton, 391 U.S. at 135-36, 88 S.Ct. at 1627-28. 52 Duque does not distinguish between Petersen's statements and the statements of the codefendants he was talking to but there is an important difference between those statements. Since Bruton is a confrontation case, Petersen's statements did not violate Bruton because he testified and was available for cross-examination. The only statements Duque can contend violated Bruton are those of the codefendants who spoke to Petersen, since they were not available for cross-examination. 53 As to those statements, Duque contends that any references to Gorny and Bell implicated him because Gorny and Bell were his only links to the conspiracy. (Duque does not state how references to Velasquez and Campos possibly could have harmed him, so we need not consider those references.) However, none of the taped statements Duque complains about mentions him directly, and the taped conversations do not contain references to unidentified people that the jury would invariably conclude were meant as references to him. Since none of the statements either directly or indirectly referred to Duque, the only way the statements could implicate him was if the jury linked the statements (specifically, the references to Gorny and Bell) to other testimony at trial. 3 54 In Richardson v. Marsh, the Court held that when a non-testifying codefendant's statement must be linked to other evidence to implicate a defendant, admitting the statement at a joint trial does not violate the Confrontation Clause so long as the trial judge adequately instructs the jury not to consider the statement against the defendant. See 481 U.S. at 208-11, 107 S.Ct. at 1707-09; see also United States v. Sherlock, 865 F.2d 1069, 1079-80 (9th Cir.1989); United States v. Garcia, 836 F.2d 385, 390-91 (8th Cir.1987). In Richardson, the Court reasoned that where the jury must link a codefendant's statement to other evidence for the statement to implicate a defendant, the probability that the jury would not be able to follow a limiting instruction does not exist as it did in Bruton. See 481 U.S. at 208, 107 S.Ct. at 1707. 55 In this case, the trial judge instructed the jury repeatedly not to consider the recorded statements against anybody except the defendant speaking on the tape. The judge gave limiting instructions each time the government played a recording to the jury, and those instructions were placed at the beginning of the transcripts of the tapes provided to the jury. The judge also instructed the jury at the end of trial not to consider evidence admitted against one defendant against any other defendants. As in Richardson, we presume the jury followed these instructions. Thus, the statements were never admitted against Duque, see 481 U.S. at 206, 107 S.Ct. at 1706, and admitting the statements did not violate Duque's right to confrontation. 4