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Opinion of Stevens, J.
may properly support a finding that the statement bears 'particularized guarantees of trustworthiness.' " Wright, 497 U. S., at 822. In Wright, we concluded that the admission of hearsay statements by a child declarant violated the Confrontation Clause even though the statements were admissible under an exception to the hearsay rule recognized in Idaho, and even though they were corroborated by other evidence. We recognized that it was theoretically possible for such statements to possess " 'particularized guarantees of trustworthiness' " that would justify their admissibility, but we refused to allow the State to "bootstrap on" the trustworthiness of other evidence. "To be admissible under the Confrontation Clause," we held, "hearsay evidence used to convict a defendant must possess indicia of reliability by virtue of its inherent trustworthiness, not by reference to other evidence at trial." Ibid.
Nor did the police's informing Mark of his Miranda rights render the circumstances surrounding his statements significantly more trustworthy. We noted in rejecting a similar argument in Lee that a finding that a confession was "voluntary for Fifth Amendment purposes . . . does not bear on the question of whether the confession was also free from any desire, motive, or impulse [the declarant] may have had either to mitigate the appearance of his own culpability by spreading the blame or to overstate [the defendant's] involvement" in the crimes at issue. 476 U. S., at 544. By the same token, we believe that a suspect's consciousness of his Miranda rights has little, if any, bearing on the likelihood of truthfulness of his statements. When a suspect is in custody for his obvious involvement in serious crimes, his knowledge that anything he says may be used against him militates against depending on his veracity.
The Commonwealth's next proffered basis for reliability— that Mark knew he was exposing himself to criminal liability—merely restates the fact that portions of his statements were technically against penal interest. And as we have ex-
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