Opinion ID: 213686
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Sixth Amendment, Bruton, and Accomplice Hearsay

Text: The Indiana Court of Appeals also failed to recognize the significant Sixth Amendment interests implicated when, as here, the out-of-court statement offered under the course of investigation exception (or for any other purported non-hearsay purpose, for that matter) is the confession of a non-testifying accomplice. The Supreme Court's jurisprudence on this subject reveals that the Sixth Amendment imposes important limits on a court's ability to admit such a statement even when it can be introduced for a non-hearsay purpose. The hearsay evidence here was very similar to the accomplice confession in Bruton v. United States, 391 U.S. 123, 88 S.Ct. 1620, 20 L.Ed.2d 476 (1968). (The difference here is that there is one extra layer of hearsay, since Parks, who supposedly confessed to Lewis, did not talk directly with the detectives who testified.) In Bruton, the Supreme Court showed just how difficult it is to offer at trial a non-testifying accomplice's confession accusing the defendant of wrongdoing. In that case, Bruton and his accomplice Evans were convicted of armed postal robbery. Id. at 124, 88 S.Ct. 1620. At their joint trial on that charge, a postal inspector testified that Evans had confessed that he and Bruton had committed the robbery. Id. On appeal, the appellate court set aside Evans' conviction because his confession had been obtained without proper Miranda warnings, but affirmed Bruton's conviction because the trial court had instructed the jury that although Evans' confession was competent evidence against Evans it was inadmissible hearsay against [Bruton] and therefore had to be disregarded in determining [Bruton's] guilt or innocence, id. at 125, 88 S.Ct. 1620. [5] The Supreme Court reversed Bruton's conviction because the introduction of Evans' confession into evidence violated Bruton's own Sixth Amendment right to confront Evans regarding the substance of that confession. The Court pointed out that Evans' confession was legitimate evidence against Evans and ... was properly before the jury during its deliberations. Id. at 127, 88 S.Ct. 1620. As a result, there existed a substantial likelihood that the jury believed that Evans had made the statements and that they were true not just the self-incriminating portions but those implicating [Bruton] as well. Id. Plainly, the Court concluded, the introduction of Evans' confession added substantial, perhaps even critical, weight to the Government's case in a form not subject to cross-examination, since Evans did not take the stand. Id. at 127-28, 88 S.Ct. 1620. In reversing Bruton's conviction, the Court made clear the extraordinary dangers posed when an accomplice's confessionone directly implicating the accused in wrongdoingis put before a jury without affording the accused an opportunity to cross-examine that accomplice. Not only are [such] incriminations devastating to the defendant but their credibility is inevitably suspect, a fact recognized when accomplices do take the stand and the jury is instructed to weigh their testimony carefully given the recognized motivation to shift blame to others. Id. at 136, 88 S.Ct. 1620. That inherent unreliability is intolerably compounded when the alleged accomplice... does not testify and cannot be tested by cross-examination. It was against such threats to a fair trial that the Confrontation Clause was directed. Id. Bruton makes clear that the protections of the Confrontation Clause are at their zenith whenever, as is the case here, the prosecution offers into evidence a non-testifying hearsay declarant's confession that names the accused as his partner in crime. [6] The Supreme Court's decision in Tennessee v. Street, 471 U.S. 409, 105 S.Ct. 2078, 85 L.Ed.2d 425 (1985), illustrates the point and shows just how difficult it is to introduce such a confession into evidence without running afoul of the Confrontation Clause. In that case, the prosecution had relied heavily on Street's detailed confession as evidence that he had murdered his neighbor in the course of a robbery. Id. at 411, 105 S.Ct. 2078. At trial, Street testified that his so-called confession was not his own, but had been derived from a written statement that alleged accomplice Peele had previously given to law enforcement. Id. To rebut this specific accusation, the prosecution had one of its witnesses read Peele's statement to the jury to illustrate the differences between that statement and Street's confession. Id. at 411-12, 105 S.Ct. 2078. In rejecting Street's claim that the testimony concerning Peele's statement had violated his constitutional right to confront Peele, the Supreme Court noted that the  nonhearsay aspect of Peele's confession not to prove what happened at the murder scene but to prove what happened when [Street] confessedraises no Confrontation Clause concerns. Id. at 414, 105 S.Ct. 2078. ( Street is most commonly cited for this principle. See, e.g., Crawford, 541 U.S. at 59, 124 S.Ct. 1354 n. 9.) The Court acknowledged that Peele's statement could have been misused by the jury as hearsay evidence, but the Court rejected this possibility because the jury had been pointedly instructed by the trial court `not to consider the truthfulness of [Peele's] statement in any way whatsoever.' Id. at 414-15, 105 S.Ct. 2078 (alteration in original). This conclusion was in obvious tension with the Court's decision in Bruton, which Street distinguished on the grounds that, unlike the situation in [that case], there were no alternatives [here] that would have both assured the integrity of the trial's truth-seeking function and eliminated the risk of the jury's improper use of evidence. Street, 471 U.S. at 415, 105 S.Ct. 2078. In particular, the Court noted that it simply was not possible to have edited [Peele's confession] to reduce the risk of jury misuse without detracting from the alleged purpose for which the confession was introduced. Id. (quotation omitted). By editing that statement, the Court noted, the trial court would have undercut the theory of defense by creating artificial differences between [Street's] and Peele's confessions. Id. at 416, 105 S.Ct. 2078. Street teaches that the non-hearsay use of a statement generally does not implicate the protections of the Confrontation Clause, but that another person's out-of-court confession directly implicating the accused is nevertheless so inherently prejudicial that its misuse as hearsay remains a strong possibility. To negate that possibility, a court admitting such a statement should always pointedly instruct the jury that the confession is to be used not for its truth, but only for a non-hearsay purpose. See id. at 414-15, 105 S.Ct. 2078. Before admitting the confession for a non-hearsay purpose, the court must exclude or redact the confession to whatever extent it is possible to do so without detracting from the alleged [non-hearsay] purpose for which the confession was introduced. See id. at 415, 105 S.Ct. 2078 (quotation omitted); Gray v. Maryland, 523 U.S. 185, 192, 118 S.Ct. 1151, 140 L.Ed.2d 294 (1998) (Unless the prosecutor wishes ... to abandon use of the confession, he must redact the confession to reduce significantly or to eliminate the special prejudice that the Bruton Court found.). Such exclusion or redaction, if possible, can go a long way to ensure that a confession's irrelevant or inflammatory details do not distract the jury from the narrow purpose for which it might legitimately consider that confession and to ensure that the jury will follow a limiting instruction. See Richardson v. Marsh, 481 U.S. 200, 211, 107 S.Ct. 1702, 95 L.Ed.2d 176 (1987) (holding that the Confrontation Clause is not violated by the admission of a non-testifying accomplice's confession if a proper limiting instruction has been given and the confession is redacted to eliminate not only the defendant's name, but any reference to his or her existence). Street also teaches that a non-testifying accomplice's confession can be admitted only if, in light of the inherent unreliability of accomplice confessions implicating the accused, see Bruton, 391 U.S. at 136, 88 S.Ct. 1620, the asserted nonhearsay purpose actually advances the compelling interests at the heart of the Court's analysis in that case: the integrity of the trial's truth-seeking function and the accuracy of the truth-determining process. See Street, 471 U.S. at 415, 105 S.Ct. 2078 (quotation omitted). This final consideration is easily the most important. Under the very unusual circumstances in Street, the only way to rebut Street's (false) allegations of fabrication was to introduce the substance of the accomplice's confession that implicated Street in the murder to show the differences. Bruton and Street help demonstrate that the Indiana Court of Appeals unreasonably applied Crawford to the facts of Jones' case. Lewis' statementthe recitation of a confession he purportedly received from his brotherwas actually offered into evidence to prove the truth of its contents. Bruton makes clear that Jones' right to confront Lewis and Parks about that confession was violated by Lewis' and Parks' failure to testify at trial and to subject their testimony to the crucible of cross-examination. Crawford, 541 U.S. at 61, 124 S.Ct. 1354; see United States v. Souffront, 338 F.3d 809, 828 (7th Cir.2003). The need for cross-examination was compelling here. The already inherent unreliability of a confession casting blame on another, see Bruton, 391 U.S. at 136, 88 S.Ct. 1620, is only magnified when, as here, the confession is filtered through two layers of hearsay: Parks to Lewis, Lewis to Detectives Jackson and Davis, and then Jackson and Davis to the jury. Even if Lewis' statement had actually been offered by the prosecution to prove only a collateral issue, not as direct evidence of Jones' guilt, that statement was clearly inadmissible under Street. First, the trial court's meager instructions to the jury were lacking. Limiting instructions were given in regard to only three specific answers by Jackson. Tr. 1334, 1353, 1390. None were given at all regarding Davis' testimony. Tr. 571-607. Such a halfhearted effort to instruct the jury properly could not be construed as a pointed instruction that the jury not consider Lewis' statement for its truth. See Street, 471 U.S. at 414-15, 105 S.Ct. 2078. [7] More fundamental, unlike the trial court in Street, the court here did not face a rare circumstance in which testimony regarding the substance of Lewis' statement was needed to preserve the integrity of the trial's truth-seeking function. See id. at 415, 105 S.Ct. 2078. As explained above, the reasons the police began investigating Jones were not relevant to the issue of Jones' guilt or innocence. Even if they were somehow relevant, those reasons could have been adequately explained by as little as a brief statement that the officers had acted on information received from an informant. The trial court simply made no effort to limit the testimony about Lewis' statement to prevent the jury from considering that statement as substantive evidence of Jones' guilt. See id.; Richardson, 481 U.S. at 211, 107 S.Ct. 1702. Rather, it allowed the prosecution free rein to introduce as much of Lewis' statement as it saw fit, even going so far as to give Jones' attorney the shocking warning that, if she continued asking questions that call [the police] investigation into question ... pretty soon all of the information they arrived at ... in the course of [that] investigation is going to end up coming in. Tr. 1434 (emphasis added). In deeming Crawford inapplicable, the Indiana Court of Appeals rested its analysis on a profound misunderstanding of both the record and the course of investigation exception it purported to apply. As a result of that misunderstanding, the state court so broadened that exception as to effectively allow inadmissible hearsay into evidence whenever a defendant challenges the weight or credibility of the admissible evidence against him. The state court also disregarded the teachings of Bruton, which flatly bars the admission of accomplice confessions such as Parks' absent an opportunity for cross-examination, and of Street, which sharply limits the circumstances in which such a confession may be introduced into evidence for a nonhearsay purpose. The state court's failure to apply Crawford to the facts of this case was so lacking in justification as to constitute an error well understood and comprehended in existing law beyond any possibility for fairminded disagreement, as required for habeas relief under AEDPA. See Harrington, 131 S.Ct. at 786-87.