Court Opinion

ID: 9466756
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:26:41.194034+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:56.395960
License: Public Domain

ROSS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I dissent from the opinion of the majority in this appeal.
In my view, the plurality opinion in Parker v. Randolph, 442 U.S. 62, 99 S.Ct. 2132, 60 L.Ed.2d 713 (1979) establishes the proper rule for the handling of sixth amendment issues in the context of interlocking confessions. As pointed out in that opinion, Bruton v. United States, 391 U.S. 123, 88 S.Ct. 1620, 20 L.Ed.2d 476 (1968) recognized that a limiting instruction does not suffice to remove the prejudicial impact of a nontestifying codefendant’s confession where the defendant has maintained his innocence from the beginning' of the proceedings. Under those circumstances, the confession of the codefendant is submitted to the jury without affording the defendant his constitutional right of cross examination. In a situation where all of the defendants have admitted their guilt, however, “the incriminating statements of a codefendant will seldom, if ever, be of the ‘devastating’ character referred to in Bruton * * Parker v. Randolph, supra, 442 U.S. at 73, 99 S.Ct. at 2139, 60 L.Ed.2d at 723. Therefore, I agree with the plurality in Parker that the admission of interlocking confessions with proper limiting instructions is sufficient to satisfy the requirements of the sixth and fourteenth amendments.