Court Opinion

ID: 9433027
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:38:45.069814+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:38.831302
License: Public Domain

Justice Scalia,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion, which I do not understand to require the simplistic view of statements against penal interest that Justice Kennedy attributes to it.
When analyzing whether evidence can be admitted under the statement-against-penal-interest exception to the hearsay rules, the relevant inquiry must always be, as the text directs, whether the statement “at the time of its making... *606so far tended to subject the declarant to ... criminal liability ... that a reasonable person in the declarant’s position would not have made the statement unless believing it to be true.” Fed. Rule Evid. 804(b)(3). I quite agree with the Court that a reading of the term “statement” to connote an extended declaration (and which would thereby allow both self-inculpatory and non-self-inculpatory parts of a declaration to be admitted so long as the declaration in the aggregate was sufficiently inculpatory) is unsupportable. See ante, at 599-600.
Employing the narrower definition of “statement,” so that Rule 804(b)(3) allows admission of only those remarks that are individually self-inculpatory, does not, as Justice Kennedy states, “eviscerate the against penal interest exception.” Post, at 616 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). A statement obviously can be self-inculpatory (in the sense of having so much of a tendency to subject one to criminal liability that a reasonable person would not make it without believing it to be true) without consisting of the confession “I committed X element of crime Y.” Consider, for example, a declarant who stated: “On Friday morning, I went into a gunshop and (lawfully) bought a particular type of handgun and particular type of ammunition. I then drove in my 1958 blue Edsel and parked in front of the First City Bank with the keys in the ignition and the driver’s door ajar. I then went inside, robbed the bank, and shot the security guard.” Although the declarant has not confessed to any element of a crime in the first two sentences, those statements in context are obviously against his penal interest, and I have no doubt that a trial judge could properly admit them.
Moreover, a declarant’s statement is not magically transformed from a statement against penal interest into one that is inadmissible merely because the declarant names another person or implicates a possible codefendant. For example, if a lieutenant in an organized crime operation described the inner workings of an extortion and protection racket, naming *607some of the other actors and thereby inculpating himself on racketeering and/or conspiracy charges, I have no doubt that some of those remarks could be admitted as statements against penal interest. Of course, naming another person, if done, for example, in a context where the declarant is minimizing culpability or criminal exposure, can bear on whether the statement meets the Rule 804(b)(3) standard. The relevant inquiry, however — and one that is not furthered by clouding the waters with manufactured categories such as “collateral neutral” and “collateral self-serving,” see, e. g., post, at 612, 618 (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment)— must always be whether the particular remark at issue (and not the extended narrative) meets the standard set forth in the Rule.