Mr. Bruton and the Confrontation Clause

        It is an established principle of United States law that every person accused of a crime has a right to cross-examine each person who is a witness against him.  This right is known as the “Confrontation Clause.” 

        Until the United States Supreme Court decided a case known as Bruton v. United States (found at 391 U.S. 123) in 1968, the exception to the rule of the right to confront witnesses was when there was a joint trial of co-defendants, one of whom made a confession inculpating the other.

        Messieurs Bruton and Evans were tried and convicted jointly of armed postal robbery.  At the trial, the co-defendant Evans did not take the stand.  However, a postal inspector testified that Evans confessed orally that he and the petitioner (our man Bruton) committed the robbery. The trial judge instructed the jury that, although Evans' confession was competent evidence against him it was inadmissible hearsay with respect to Mr. Bruton and the confession had to be disregarded in determining petitioner's guilt or innocence.* 

        Evans and Bruton both appealed their convictions to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. That court set aside Evans' conviction on the ground that the oral confession should not have been received against him, but affirmed Bruton’s conviction in view of the trial judge's instructions, relying on a case decided several years earlier, Delli Paoli v. United States.  .

        The theory relied upon in Delli Paoli was that the court’s instructions to the jury meant that the jury did not really consider the confession with respect to the guilt (or innocence) of the defendant Bruton.  That seems rather bizarre to me!

        The United States Supreme Court apparently agreed with me.  The court found that “[b]ecause of the substantial risk that the jury, despite instructions to the contrary, looked to the incriminating extrajudicial statements in determining petitioner's guilt, admission of Evans' confession in the joint trial violated petitioner's right of cross-examination secured by the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment [to the United States Constitution] . . . 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. Petitioner thus was denied his constitutional right of confrontation. . . . The fact of the matter is that, too often, such admonition against misuse is intrinsically ineffective, in that the effect of such a non-admissible declaration cannot be wiped from the brains of the jurors. The admonition therefore becomes a futile collocation of words, and fails of its purpose as a legal protection to defendants against whom such a declaration should not tell."

        It is only through egregious actions by prosecutors that we citizens are granted a full and meaningful measure of constitutional rights.  We all owe Mr. Bruton a debt of gratitude for his unknowing contribution to the civil rights of all American citizens.