OCTOBER TERM, 1997
Syllabus
certiorari to the court of appeals of maryland
No. 96-8653. Argued December 8, 1997—Decided March 9, 1998
Anthony Bell confessed to the police that he, petitioner Gray, and another man participated in the beating that caused Stacey Williams' death. After the third man died, a Maryland grand jury indicted Bell and Gray for murder, and the State tried them jointly. When the trial judge permitted the State to introduce a redacted version of Bell's confession, the detective who read it to the jury said "deleted" or "deletion" whenever the name of Gray or the third participant appeared. Immediately after that reading, however, the detective answered affirmatively when the prosecutor asked, "after [Bell] gave you that information, you subsequently were able to arrest . . . Gray; is that correct?" The State also introduced a written copy of the confession with the two names omitted, leaving in their place blanks separated by commas. The judge instructed the jury that the confession could be used as evidence only against Bell, not Gray. The jury convicted both defendants. Mary-land's intermediate appellate court held that Bruton v. United States, 391 U. S. 123, prohibited use of the confession and set aside Gray's conviction. Maryland's highest court disagreed and reinstated that conviction.
Held: The confession here at issue, which substituted blanks and the word
"delete" for Gray's proper name, falls within the class of statements to which Bruton's protective rule applies. Pp. 189-197.
(a) Bruton also involved two defendants tried jointly for the same crime, with the confession of one of them incriminating both himself and the other. This Court held that, despite a limiting instruction that the jury should consider the confession as evidence only against the confessing codefendant, the introduction of such a confession at a joint trial violates the nonconfessing defendant's Sixth Amendment right to cross-examine witnesses. The Court explained that this situation, in which the powerfully incriminating extrajudicial statements of a codefendant are deliberately spread before the jury in a joint trial, is one of the contexts in which the risk that the jury will not, or cannot, follow limiting instructions is so great, and the consequences of failure so devastating to the defendant, that the introduction of the evidence cannot be allowed. See 391 U. S., at 135-136. Bruton's scope was limited by Richardson v. Marsh, 481 U. S. 200, 211, in which the Court held that the Confrontation Clause is not violated by the admission of a nontesti-
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