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Syllabus
fying codefendant's confession with a proper limiting instruction when the confession is redacted to eliminate not only that defendant's name, but any reference to his or her existence. Pp. 189-191.
(b) Unlike Richardson's redacted confession, the confession here refers directly to Gray's "existence." Redactions that simply replace a name with an obvious blank space or a word such as "deleted" or a symbol or other similarly obvious indications of alteration leave statements that, considered as a class, so closely resemble Bruton's unredacted statements as to warrant the same legal results. For one thing, a jury will often react similarly to an unredacted confession and a confession redacted as here, for it will realize that the confession refers specifically to the defendant, even when the State does not blatantly link the defendant to the deleted name, as it did below by asking the detective whether Gray was arrested on the basis of information in Bell's confession. For another thing, the obvious deletion may well call the jurors' attention specially to the removed name. By encouraging the jury to speculate about the reference, the redaction may overemphasize the importance of the confession's accusation—once the jurors work out the reference. Finally, Bruton's protected statements and statements redacted to leave a blank or some other similarly obvious alteration, function the same way grammatically: They point directly to, and accuse, the nonconfessing codefendant. Pp. 192-195.
(c) Although Richardson placed outside Bruton's scope statements that incriminate inferentially, 481 U. S., at 208, and the jury must use inference to connect Bell's statements with Gray, Richardson does not control the result here. Inference pure and simple cannot make the critical difference. If it did, then Richardson would also place outside Bruton's scope confessions that use, e. g., nicknames and unique descriptions, whereas this Court has assumed that such identifiers fall inside Bruton's protection, see Harrington v. California, 395 U. S. 250, 253. Thus, Richardson must depend in significant part upon the kind of, not the simple fact of, inference. Richardson's inferences involved statements that did not refer directly to the defendant himself, but became incriminating "only when linked with evidence introduced later at trial." 481 U. S., at 208. In contrast, the inferences here involve statements that, despite redaction, obviously refer directly to someone, often obviously to Gray, and involve inferences that a jury ordinarily could make immediately, even were the confession the very first item introduced at trial. Richardson's policy reasons for its conclusion—that application of Bruton's rule would force prosecutors to abandon use either of the confession or of a joint trial in instances where adequate redaction would "not [be] possible," 481 U. S., at 209, and would lead to those same
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