Opinion ID: 4027027
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Bruton Violation in Lambert’s Trial

Text: Lambert has two arguments for why his trial violated Bruton. First, he contends that it and its progeny required severance of his trial from Garcia’s. He claims this is a straightforward application of our Bruton-based decisions in Vazquez v. Wilson, 550 F.3d 270 (3d Cir. 2008); Eley v. Erickson, 712 F.3d 837 (3d Cir. 2013); and Washington v. Sec’y Pa. Dep’t of Corr., 801 F.3d 160 (3d Cir. 2015). Next, he asserts that, even assuming a joint trial was permissible, a Bruton violation occurred during closing arguments because of the prosecutor’s comments. He labels this a prosecutorial misconduct claim.7 We agree with this second argument and conclude, without deciding whether the denial of the severance request was proper, that the comments during closing arguments violated Bruton. 7 At the outset of this appeal, there appeared to be disagreement about whether this claim is properly before us. “Before a federal court may grant habeas relief to a state prisoner, the prisoner must exhaust his remedies in state court. In other words, the state prisoner must give the state courts an opportunity to act on his claims before he presents those claims to a federal court in a habeas petition.” O’Sullivan v. Boerckel, 526 U.S. 838, 842 (1999). To ensure that state courts have this opportunity, the petitioner’s claims must be “fairly presented” to them. Picard v. Connor, 404 U.S. 270, 275 (1971). This means that the petitioner must put before the state courts the “substantial equivalent” of the claims pursued in federal court. Id. at 278. In his brief, Lambert, in addition to arguing that the prosecutor’s comments violated Bruton, also invoked the Supreme Court’s standards for prosecutorial misconduct from Donnelly v. DeChristoforo, 416 U.S. 637 (1974), and Darden v. 20 We start from the undisputed premise, stated by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, that “[t]here is no point in redacting and sanitizing otherwise inculpatory statements of a non-testifying co-defendant, to facilitate a joint trial, if that protective measure approved by the [U.S. Supreme] Court to comport with the Confrontation Clause could be deliberately and directly undone by lawyer commentary.” Brown, 925 A.2d at 159. Indeed, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court conceded that, under the right circumstances, there could be a Bruton violation based on an “argument by counsel concerning Bruton-redacted evidence.” Id. at 160. As an example, it imagined a scenario where a prosecutor tells the jury: “You heard the co-defendant’s confession, which also described the actions of someone he identified only as ‘the other guy;’ well, I’m here to tell you that ‘the other guy’ he was speaking of was the defendant and we just changed the wording of the statement.” Id. at 159 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is correct, of course, that those circumstances would violate Bruton. Were it Wainwright, 477 U.S. 168 (1986). Those cases held that improper comments by prosecutors result in constitutional error when they “so infect[] the trial with unfairness as to make the resulting conviction a denial of due process.” Darden, 477 U.S. at 181 (quoting Donnelly, 416 U.S. at 643) (internal quotation marks omitted). The Commonwealth correctly notes that Lambert did not present an argument based on this standard to the state courts. However, as discussed below, we resolve this claim based only on Bruton and its progeny. Because the Commonwealth agreed at oral argument that a Bruton-based attack on the prosecutor’s comments was in front of the state courts, the fair presentation requirement does not create any obstacles here. 21 otherwise, Bruton would mean little. There would be no point in redacting confessions only to have the identities of the codefendants blatantly unmasked. And we know from Gray that Bruton is not so easily defeated. Otherwise, the Supreme Court would not have gone out of its way to say that Bruton cannot be circumvented by replacing somebody’s name with an obvious identifier (such as the “red-haired, bearded, oneeyed man-with-a-limp”). Gray, 523 U.S at 195 (internal quotation marks omitted). Indeed, we discern no difference in effect between the situation in Bruton, where the jury heard an unredacted statement naming the co-defendant, and one where the jury hears a redacted statement but is later told to whom the redactions refer. If there were any doubt as to the applicability of Bruton to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s hypothetical, Richardson eliminated it. On the one hand, Richardson made clear that a properly redacted confession does not violate the Confrontation Clause when linked with other admissible evidence. Yet it also established that a prosecutor’s inadmissible use of a confession during closing arguments runs afoul of Bruton. That is because it is “error” for a prosecutor “to undo the effect of the limiting instruction.” 481 U.S. at 211. We part company, however, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court with regard to the three attempts it made to distinguish our case from its hypothetical example. First, it implied that a prosecutor’s unmasking of a co-defendant must be done “deliberately” for Bruton to come into play. Brown, 925 A.2d at 159. Any such requirement of intentional conduct would be contrary to clearly established Supreme Court law. Specifically, the Court in Frazier said that “we do not believe that the prosecutor’s good faith, or lack of it, is controlling in determining whether a defendant has been deprived of the right of confrontation.” 394 U.S. at 736. Here, though there is 22 no evidence that the prosecutor acted in bad faith, that is irrelevant for constitutional purposes. Indeed, the Commonwealth conceded (as it must) during oral argument before us that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court erred by suggesting that intent matters. Second, we disagree that the statement needs to be as conspicuous as the example presented by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where the prosecutor tells the jury that the confession had been redacted and had previously included the co-defendant’s name. During closing arguments, the prosecutor revealed that Garcia took Lambert to his house, where the latter pulled out the murder weapon. Thus, the prosecutor’s comments conveyed a message—that Lambert was the person whose name was withheld in the redacted confession—as clearly as would have been the case in the example used by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.8 8 If there had been other evidence that Lambert went home with Garcia and took out the murder weapon, the prosecutor properly could have relied on that in closing arguments as long as she did not also encourage the jury to use the redacted confession against Lambert. The Commonwealth argues that this is the case here. It says that the prosecutor was not undoing the redactions but instead was encouraging the jury to draw inferences from other evidence in the record. However, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected this argument and found that “Garcia’s statement was the only source suggesting that Garcia took [Lambert] to his house.” Brown, 925 A.2d at 156 n.5. Under AEDPA, this factual determination is “presumed to be correct,” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(e)(1), and there is no reason here to set aside that presumption. 23 Moreover, Richardson forecloses the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s analysis. As discussed, a redacted confession in that case described a conversation that took place in a car, and Marsh admitted that she was in that same car. The prosecutor put these two facts together in closing arguments and asked the jury to draw the inference that Marsh heard the conversation. That is much less direct than our case, where the prosecutor did more than merely argue an inference and instead recounted the confession as though Lambert’s name had been in it all along. Though the prosecutor in Richardson did not unmask Marsh as a passenger in the car—Marsh did that herself through her testimony—the Court nonetheless found a Confrontation Clause error. 481 U.S. at 211. The only reason why the Court remanded rather than granting relief directly was the failure of defense counsel to object during closing arguments—a failure not present here. In terms of applying this clearly established Supreme Court precedent, our opinion in Vazquez provides useful guidance.9 There, as here, the prosecutor, without going so far as telling the jury that the confession had been redacted to omit the co-defendant’s name, “effectively eliminated the redaction” through a slip of the tongue during closing 9 We do not rely on Vazquez as having created clearly established law, as only Supreme Court cases can do that for AEDPA purposes. Rather, we look to it to determine the principles that we have determined previously to be clearly defined by Supreme Court cases. Cf. Marshall v. Rodgers, 133 S. Ct. 1446, 1450 (2013) (noting that “an appellate panel may, in accordance with its usual law-of-the-circuit procedures, look to circuit precedent to ascertain whether it has already held that the particular point in issue is clearly established by Supreme Court precedent”). 24 arguments while paraphrasing the confession. 550 F.3d at 275. Though we granted relief on other grounds, we also interpreted Bruton to leave “no doubt” that the comments during closing arguments were “a grave and probably fatal constitutional violation.” Id. at 283 n.14. There was “no difference between the admission of [the] unredacted statement” at the outset and a situation where the prosecutor negates the redactions during arguments. Id.; see also Fowler v. Ward, 200 F.3d 1302, 1311 (10th Cir. 2000) (noting that it would “squarely violate[]” the Confrontation Clause even to “suggest” that a redacted confession implicated a codefendant), overruled on other grounds by Slack v. McDaniel, 529 U.S. 473 (2000). Finally, we disagree with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s reliance on Frazier as a means of escaping Bruton’s command. As discussed, the Court in Frazier gave four reasons for its conclusion. None apply here. The first and second factors are that the prosecutor in Frazier 1) summarized a confession that 2) was never actually read— redacted or otherwise—to the jury. Here the jury heard a full reading of the redacted confession and then had the redactions compromised during closing arguments. This difference is critical. The task of the jury in Frazier was merely to pretend that there was no confession. By contrast, the jury here was asked to consider the confession, but only against Garcia, when the prosecutor effectively said during closing arguments that it also implicated Lambert. That is the situation Bruton describes as “intolerabl[e].” 391 U.S. at 136. Meanwhile, the third Frazier factor—that there was only one defendant on trial, so the “jury was not being asked to perform the mental gymnastics of considering an incriminating statement against only one of two defendants in a joint trial,” 394 U.S. at 735—is not present here because there was a joint trial and jurors were told that they had to 25 limit their use of the confession to one defendant. Once again, this places us squarely within Bruton and its warning that “there are some contexts in which the risk that the jury will not, or cannot, follow instructions is so great, and the consequences of failure so vital to the defendant, that the practical and human limitations of the jury system cannot be ignored.” 391 U.S. at 135. The final factor in Frazier was that the evidence was not “vitally important” to the prosecution’s case. 394 U.S. at 735. As discussed below in explaining why the error was not harmless, the evidence here was crucial to the Commonwealth’s case. Properly understood, then, Frazier does not carry the day for the Commonwealth. Frazier made clear that not all mistakes in opening or closing statements are Bruton violations. But it never said (or even implied) that Bruton has a back door that allows prosecutors to do what the Supreme Court has expressly forbidden—dangle an incriminating statement in front of jurors, tell them it implicates a particular defendant, and then expect that they will not use it against that person. We therefore hold, as a matter of clearly established Supreme Court law, that the prosecutor’s comments violated the Confrontation Clause. There are some circumstances when the prosecution can commit what otherwise would be a constitutional violation but nonetheless escape a mistrial through limiting instructions. However, in cases falling within the ambit of Bruton and its progeny, limiting instructions cannot cure the error. See Bruton, 391 U.S. at 135–36. This is such a case. In deciding otherwise, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court acted contrary to U.S. Supreme Court law by apparently requiring prosecutors to act in bad faith for 26 protections to arise, and it misapplied Bruton, Frazier, Richardson, and Gray by not requiring a mistrial.