134
Opinion of Stevens, J.
to 1995, it appears that even Virginia rarely allowed statements against the penal interest of the declarant to be used at criminal trials. See, e. g., Ellison v. Commonwealth, 219 Va. 404, 247 S. E. 2d 685 (1978). That Virginia relaxed that portion of its hearsay law when it decided Chandler v. Commonwealth, 249 Va. 270, 455 S. E. 2d 219 (1995), and that it later apparently concluded that all statements against penal interest fall within "a 'firmly rooted' exception to the hearsay rule in Virginia," 255 Va., at 575, 499 S. E. 2d, at 534, is of no consequence. The decisive fact, which we make explicit today, is that accomplices' confessions that inculpate a criminal defendant are not within a firmly rooted exception to the hearsay rule as that concept has been defined in our Confrontation Clause jurisprudence.5
918 S. W. 2d 511, 515 (Tex. Crim. App. 1996); In re Anthony Ray, Mc., 200 W. Va. 312, 321, 489 S. E. 2d 289, 298 (1997). Still other States have virtually no against-penal-interest exception at all. See Ala. Rule Evid. 804(b)(3) (1998) (no such exception); Ga. Code Ann. § 24-3-8 (1995) (exception only if declarant is deceased and statement was not made with view toward litigation); State v. Skillicorn, 944 S. W. 2d 877, 884-885 (Mo.) (no exception), cert. denied, 522 U. S. 999 (1997).
5 Our holdings in Bruton v. United States, 391 U. S. 123 (1968), Cruz v. New York, 481 U. S. 186 (1987), Gray v. Maryland, 523 U. S. 185 (1998), and Lee v. Illinois, 476 U. S. 530 (1986), were all premised, explicitly or implicitly, on the principle that accomplice confessions that inculpate a criminal defendant are not per se admissible (and thus necessarily fall outside a firmly rooted hearsay exception), no matter how much those statements also incriminate the accomplice. If "genuinely" or "equally" inculpatory confessions of accomplices were—as The Chief Justice's concurrence suggests is possible, post, at 146—per se admissible against criminal defendants, then the confessions in each of those cases would have been admissible, for each confession inculpated the accomplice equally in the crimes at issue. But the Court in Lee rejected the dissent's position that a nontestifying accomplice's confessions that are "unambiguously" against the accomplice's penal interest are per se admissible, see 476 U. S., at 552 (Blackmun, J., dissenting) and we ruled in Bruton, Cruz, and Gray that such equally self-inculpatory statements are inadmissible against criminal defendants. Today we merely reaffirm these holdings
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