Court Opinion

ID: 9706714
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:50:23.959309+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:41:29.113931
License: Public Domain

Brickley, J.
(concurring). Few situations in criminal law generate more troubling and thorny issues than the substantive admissibility of an accomplice’s custodial confession against a codefen-dant. The United States Supreme Court has long recognized the hazards exposed to the right of confrontation in cases where the state seeks to admit a nontestifying codefendant’s confession. Bruton v United States, 391 US 123; 88 S Ct 1620; 20 L Ed 2d 476 (1968).
*677I agree with the result reached by the Chief Justice that the trial court erroneously allowed admission of the codefendant’s confessions under the facts presented, and that the error was not harmless. The Chief Justice’s position that the statement against interest hearsay exception is not based on the circumstances surrounding the giving of the statement, but on its contents and therefore admissibility should be limited to only those statements contrary to the declarant’s penal interest has considerable logic. However, because the parties did not raise this particular issue in the lower courts, the defendants did not raise it on appeal, and the prosecutor raised the issue only in a footnote on the last page of his brief, I decline to endorse the Chief Justice’s reasoning regarding the so-called carry-over rule in the context of declarations against penal interest. The lead opinion predicts all too accurately that "as a general matter, ... accusatory statements in codefendant confessions will almost never properly qualify as statements against interest.” Ante, pp 646-647. I would leave this issue open for another day.
I respectfully cannot agree with the dissent that the confessions at issue "bear the particular guarantees of trustworthiness required by the Sixth Amendment.” (Post, p 701.) The reliability of the confession of Jordan is powerfully undercut by his opening statement in reply to the question of why he was making a statement that he would not "take the fall alone.” Miller’s confession appears even less reliable than Jordan’s in that it minimizes Miller’s involvement in the criminal transaction and maximizes the affirmatively bad acts of his codefendants.1 Furthermore, unlike United *678States v Layton, 855 F2d 1388, 1402 (CA 9, 1988), this case involves a custodial confession, not a noncustodial statement against interest made to a trusted adviser.2 Thus, both the circumstances surrounding the statements and the substance of the statements themselves mitigate against their admissibility, even without considering that codefen-dant confessions are presumptively unreliable and that the statement against interest exception has not been conclusively validated as a "firmly rooted” hearsay exception.
As in Lee v Illinois, 476 US 530; 106 S Ct 2056; 90 L Ed 2d 514 (1986), I would conclude that both the circumstances and the substance of these confessions indicate an unacceptable basis of reliability for Confrontation Clause purposes. For these reasons, I support the result, although not the entire reasoning of the Chief Justice’s opinion.
Griffin, J., concurred with Brickley, J.

 Indeed, it is conceivable from the text of Miller’s statement that he may not have even realized he was uttering a statement against interest or confessing to criminal acts given a layperson’s likely misapprehension of the intricacies of accomplice liability.

 Similarly, it cannot be said, under the Layton factors that these confessions were "made contemporaneously with the occurrence of the events [which they] reference[]” or that the "statement[s] [were] uttered spontaneously,” or that "the person to whom the statement was made [was] someone to whom the declarant would likely speak truthfully.” (Post, p 699.)