When two people are charged with a crime where one confesses and implicates the other, issues of the right of confrontation and psychology collide. Imagine a joint trial with two codefendants, known as A and B. If defendant A’s confession reads “I did the crime with B,” it is admissible against A, but inadmissible against B because B cannot “confront,” or cross-examine A. But if a police detective reads A’s confession in court, the jury will hear A accusing B.
In cases with codefendants, jurors were historically instructed to ignore A’s accusation against B when deciding B’s guilt. That changed with Bruton v. United States in 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court held that “there are some contexts in which the risk that the jury will not, or cannot, follow instructions is so great…, that the … human limitations of the jury system cannot be ignored.” In other words, in the case of A and B, humans cannot “unhear” A’s accusation against B and may be unwittingly influenced by it.
After Bruton, subsequent decisions made the choices simple in cases with codefendants—have two separate trials, with the confession admissible only at A’s trial; have a joint trial and remove all mention of B and B’s conduct from A’s confession so it only tells A’s role, and still instruct the jury it cannot be used against B; or “redact” the confession, removing B’s name but substituting a neutral descriptor of B such as “I drove the car and a different person went in the bank,” and again instruct the jury to use it only against A. Now, the law has veered back nearly to its pre-1968 status.
In June 2023, the Supreme Court decided Samia v. United States. At the trial of Samia and his codefendant, the codefendant’s confession was read in court with Samia’s name replaced with “the other guy.” Upon appeal, the Supreme Court majority, citing no science, said that “jurors can be relied upon to follow the trial judge’s instruction” to ignore the codefendant’s accusation against Samia—“the other guy”—even with the codefendant sitting next to Samia.
Samia raises important empirical issues. How does a codefendant’s confession that references “the other guy’s” criminal involvement affect some jurists’ legal judgments about that other defendant? And are legal admonition instructions in such cases sufficient when a confession simply references the codefendant as “the other guy”?
One may reasonably assume that a codefendant’s confession referencing “the other guy” will nevertheless harm that defendant at a joint trial. But the Samia ruling reveals that some in the legal profession disagree. These disparate opinions, along with a legal issue directly amenable to empirical inquiry, evince the need for more social science investigation.
Research has long found that judicial instructions to ignore evidence are generally ineffective (Steblay, N., et al., Law and Human Behavior, Vol. 30, No. 4, 2006opens in new window). Yet it is important to conduct ecologically valid research on the specific issue at hand—that is, how people perceive confessions by one defendant that may unfairly implicate a codefendant. Such research will not only provide the most reliable and accurate answer to this empirical question, but it may also prove more persuasive to courts when assessing this consequential legal situation. For example, a prospective study could compare people’s legal judgments upon hearing a codefendant’s confession that either references the other defendant’s name, “the other guy,” a different person, or makes no reference to the other defendant on trial. More research could additionally manipulate admonition instructions to directly establish whether they serve their intended purpose. With such studies, the courts would have data directly speaking to the impact of a confession referencing “the other guy,” as well as to whether instructions to ignore using this redacted confession against the codefendant work as intended.
