Court Opinion

ID: 9786768
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 00:02:22.107401+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:36:48.531480
License: Public Domain

FIDEL, Judge,
concurring in part; dissenting in part.
¶ 78 The victim’s mother unexpectedly testified that Darrion Hartley, a non-testifying co-defendant, had confessed over the telephone that the victim had not willingly engaged in sex:
I asked Darrion, ... how many guys was there? He said, oh, about 30. And I said, did my daughter willingly have sex with you guys? He said no. That’s when I asked him, I said, Darrion, you’re supposed to been my daughter’s friend, she trusted you. I said why did you let this happen? He said, it got out of control, it got out of hand.
The trial judge promptly told the jury not to consider Hartley’s alleged statement as evidence against defendants other than Hartley. But this was not a bell so easily unrung.
¶ 79 The Bruton line of cases undertakes to accommodate the confrontation rights of criminal defendants to the practicalities of multi-defendant trials. Trials cannot be precisely scripted. Not every bit of testimony can be foreseen. Trial courts must occasionally tell juries to ignore something they should not have heard. If trial courts could not do so, if they were obliged to mistry and retry every case where untoward evidence slipped by, the system could not absorb the cost.
¶80 Thus, the law indulges the “almost invariable assumption” that juries, when instructed to ignore evidence, will follow their instruction. Richardson, 481 U.S. at 206, 107 S.Ct. 1702. Yet the law acknowledges that this assumption rests on need and not on truth. In Richardson, Justice Scalia somewhat euphemistically explained:
The rule that juries are presumed to follow their instructions is a pragmatic one, rooted less in the absolute certitude that the presumption is true than in the belief that it represents a reasonable practical accommodation of the interests of the state and the defendant in the criminal justice process.
Id. at 211, 107 S.Ct. 1702. In Bruton, the Court was more direct:
*546“The naive assumption that prejudicial effects can be overcome by instructions to the jury ... all practicing lawyers know to be unmitigated fiction.”
Bruton, 391 U.S. at 129, 88 S.Ct. 1620 (quoting Krulewitch v. United States, 336 U.S. 440, 453, 69 S.Ct. 716, 93 L.Ed. 790 (1949) (Jackson, J., concurring)).
¶ 81 In Bruton, the Court recognized that cases will arise where justice demands an exception to the ordinary rule:
[Tjhere 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, 88 S.Ct. 1620. But the Court has struggled ever since to define the contours of the exception.
A.
¶ 82 In Richardson, the Court undertook to limit the Bruton exception to the directly incriminating statements of non-testifying co-defendants — statements incriminating on their face — and to distinguish statements that incriminate only by inference. When the jury must engage in inference to link such a statement to the defendant, the Court observed, “it is a less valid generalization that the jury will not likely obey the instruction to disregard the evidence.” 481 U.S. at 208, 107 S.Ct. 1702 (emphasis added).11
¶ 83 My colleagues find no significant difference between codefendant Williams’s inferentially incriminating statement in Richardson and the statement attributed to co-defendant Hartley in this case. Supra ¶ 46 n. 8. Upon closer examination, however, a substantial difference may be seen.
¶ 84 Defendant Marsh admitted in Richardson that she rode to the victims’ home with Williams and Martin but denied knowing they were armed and planned to rob and shoot the victims there. As she described events, she entered the home with Martin to ask one of the victims, an acquaintance, for a loan, and, after Martin pulled a gun, she was too scared to flee. Although she acknowledged participating as events unfolded by opening the door for Williams when he rang the doorbell and holding a bag (apparently stolen money) for Martin, she attributed her actions to duress, saying she did not feel free to leave. 481 U.S. at 204, 107 S.Ct. 1702.
¶ 85 Marsh was tried with Williams, and Williams’s confession, although redacted to omit any reference to Marsh, permitted the inference that Marsh knew the plan to rob and kill the victims in advance. Specifically, Williams said that he and Martin had discussed the robbery in the car on the way to the house and that, during their discussion, Martin had said that “he would have to take [the victims] out.” Id. at 203 n. 1, 107 S.Ct. 1702. Marsh testified that she was in the back seat of the car and that Martin and Williams were talking in the front seat, but that the radio was too loud for her to hear what they were saying. Id. at 204, 107 S.Ct. 1702. But if the jury disbelieved Marsh’s testimony, it could have inferred that Marsh had overheard the front seat conversation and knew en route that robbery and murder were the plan. Id.
¶86 With this background, we may compare the effects of the co-defendants’ statements in Richardson and in this case. There, the central question was whether Marsh had foreknowledge of the intended crimes. Here, the central question is whether Defendant had consensual or non-consensual sex with the victim. In Richardson, the co-defendant’s statement did not address the central question. Williams did not say that Marsh knew of the intended crimes. Nor did he say she heard his conversation with Williams. Nor did he even say whether the volume of their voices and the volume of the radio were such that Marsh could have heard their conversation. Only through a chain of disputed inferences could the jury have concluded from Williams’s statement that Marsh had heard and understood enough of the front seat conversation to know that robbery *547and murder were the plan. Here, by contrast, the statement attributed to co-defendant Hartley directly addresses the focal question of consensúa,! sex, and does so in a manner that transparently incriminates Blackman and the other defendants: “And I said, did my daughter willingly have sex with you guys? He said no.”
B.
¶ 87 The transparently incriminating nature of Hartley’s comment makes Gray more pertinent than Richardson to the analysis of this case. In Gray, a majority of the Supreme Court found Richardson’s distinction between direct and inferential incrimination an inadequate basis for disposition. Acknowledging that a jury would need an inference to link the defendant to a co-defendant’s redacted confession that “Me, deleted, deleted, and a few other guys” beat the victim to death, the Court nonetheless found the statement facially incriminatory. The majority reasoned that the redacted confession so transparently included the defendant among the deleted participants as to “resemble Bruton ’s unredacted statements [and to] require the same result.” Gray, 523 U.S. at 192, 118 S.Ct. 1151.
¶ 88 In a passage that my colleagues rely on, the Gray majority added that redaction of a co-defendant’s confession remained a potentially viable device.12 Instead of “Me, deleted, deleted, and a few other guys,” the Court mused, “Why could the witness not, instead, have said ... Me and a few other guys.” Id. at 196, 118 S.Ct. 1151. My colleagues find Hartley’s inculpatory statement acceptable in the present case because it “comport[s] with the Supreme Court’s example in Gray.” Supra ¶ 51.
¶ 89 For several reasons, I disagree. First, the Gray example was dictum, and evoked a strong warning from four members of the Court regarding the “risk to the integrity of our system (not to mention the increase in its complexity) posed by the approval of such freelance editing.” Gray, 523 U.S. at 203-04, 118 S.Ct. 1151 (Scalia, J., dissenting). “[I]t is a good deal of a mystery to me[,]” Justice Cardozo once wrote, “how judges, of all persons in the world, should put their faith in dicta. A brief experience on the bench was enough to reveal to me all sorts of cracks and crevices and loopholes in my own opinions when picked up a few months after delivery, and reread with due contrition.” Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process 29-30 (1921). Heeding Justice Cardozo’s lesson, we should not let the Gray majority’s dictum determine our disposition here.
¶ 90 But second, if we do compare the Gray example with our ease, Hartley’s statement is not, as my colleagues contend, “more tenuously]” linked with Defendant than “Me and a few other guys” with Gray. Supra ¶ 52. The victim in Gray was beaten by six youths; the question at trial was whether Gray was one of them. One witness for the prosecution placed Gray among the group chasing the victim, and another placed him among the group kicking the victim. But Gray testified that he was down the street in a phone booth at the time of the beating, and two other defense witnesses corroborated his testimony. See State v. Gray, 344 Md. 417, 687 A.2d 660, 661-62 (1997). In short, it was highly disputed in that case whether Gray was one of the “other guys.”
¶ 91 In this case, by contrast, it was entirely undisputed that Hartley’s four co-defendants were among the “30 guys.” Not only did they acknowledge being present; they acknowledged engaging in sexual relations with the victim. The issue was consent. Indeed, consent was the only defense, and the whole focus of the trial. Thus, when Hartley, according to the mother, admitted that the victim did not “willingly have sex with you guys,” his statement was transparently and powerfully incriminating against all his co-defendants, for it swept their only defense away.
¶ 92 My colleagues, isolating a portion of Hartley’s statement from its context, suggest that his explanation, “things got out of hand,” *548left Defendant free to establish that things did not get out of hand until after Defendant had consensual sex with the victim. Supra ¶ 53. But Hartley’s comment that things got out of hand was his explanation why the victim did not “willingly have sex with you guys,” a statement that in context swept in “about 30” guys, including all of the defendants.
¶ 93 My colleagues also ignore, in assuming that Defendant could respond to Hartley’s statement, that the trial court admitted the statement only against Hartley and not against the other defendants. Although my colleagues and I dispute the likely efficacy of the trial court’s effort to limit the evidence to Hartley, the point remains that no defendant other than Hartley could address his comment without highlighting it and accepting it as evidence applicable to his case.
¶ 94 My colleagues’ effort to parse the several parts of Hartley’s statement is telling, however, because it underscores the inability of Blackman and the other defendants to do the same by confronting their accuser and subjecting his statement to cross-examination. Hartley did not testify; nor could he be required to do so. His co-defendants could not probe his observations. They could not ask him what or whom he saw, or how clearly he saw “things,” before or after they “got out of hand.” Hartley’s statement destroyed their one defense, yet they were powerless to confront him.
C.
¶ 95 In summary, although my colleagues seek in Richardson and Gray a template for the ready disposition of Bruton claims, no such template can be fashioned for “[t]he infinite variability of inculpatory statements ... and of their likely effect on juries.” Cruz v. New York, 481 U.S. 186, 192, 107 S.Ct. 1714, 95 L.Ed.2d 162 (1987) (quoting Parker v. Randolph, 442 U.S. 62, 84, 99 S.Ct. 2132, 60 L.Ed.2d 713 (1979) (Stevens, J., dissenting)). In Richardson, the Court offered as a template the distinction between direct and inferential incrimination; in Gray the Court recognized the inadequacy of that distinction in the face of a statement too transparently and powerfully incriminating to be ignored. The lesson we should take from these cases is to resist the lure of categorical disposition and to remain alert to statements so transparently and powerfully incriminating that they cannot be squared with a defendant’s vital confrontation rights.
¶ 96 In Coy v. Iowa, the Supreme Court, through Justice Scalia, stated, “[Tjhere is something deep in human nature that regards face-to-face confrontation between accused and accuser as ‘essential to a fair trial in a criminal prosecution.’ ” 487 U.S. 1012, 1017, 108 S.Ct. 2798, 101 L.Ed.2d 857 (1988) (quoting Pointer v. Texas, 380 U.S. 400, 404, 85 S.Ct. 1065, 13 L.Ed.2d 923 (1965)). Defendant Hartley, through his out-of-court statement to the victim’s mother, was a devastating witness against his co-defendants. But he could not be confronted, for he did not take the stand. It is a pretense unworthy of the law, in my opinion, that the jury could “perform the overwhelming task of considering [Hartley’s statement] in determining the guilt or innocence of [Hartley] and then of ignoring it in determining the guilt or innocence of [his] co-defendants.” Bruton, 391 U.S. at 131, 88 S.Ct. 1620.
¶ 97 For the foregoing reasons, I respect-' fully dissent from parts B(2) and (3) of the majority’s opinion and, accordingly, from its result. I would reverse and remand for a new trial.

. Just as the Court ascribed practicality, not truth, to the assumption that juries can usually follow an instruction to disregard the evidence, id. at 211, 107 S.Ct. 1702, the Court declined, even in instances of inferential linkage, to pretend that the common perception is invalid that juries can rarely do so. “Less valid” was the most the Court could bring itself to say.

. In Richardson, the Court had reasoned that a practical benefit of limiting the Bruton exception to facially incriminating confessions is to permit compliance by redaction. See Richardson, 481 U.S. at 208-09, 107 S.Ct. 1702.