Page:Samia v. United States.pdf/30

6 Philippines. And it knew the role that each defendant allegedly played in the crime: Hunter had hired Stillwell and Samia as hitmen, and those two men carried out the murder. In fact, the prosecutor began his opening statement with the exact sequence of events Stillwell had described in his interview: The prosecutor told jurors that Samia “shot [the victim] twice in the face” while the victim “was riding in the backseat of a van driven” by Stillwell. Id., at 52. So when the federal agent took the stand on day two of the trial, it didn’t make a lick of difference that he didn’t identify the shooter by name, but instead used placeholder terms. Any reasonable juror would have realized immediately—and without reference to any other evidence—that “the other person” who “pulled the trigger” was Samia.

That fact makes Stillwell’s confession inadmissible under our Bruton precedent. The agent’s testimony about the confession pointed a finger straight at Samia, no less than if the agent had used Samia’s name or called him “deleted.”

So how does the majority reach a contrary result? The nomenclature it adopts isn’t the problem: In describing Bruton’s scope, the majority distinguishes “between confessions that directly implicate a defendant and those that do so indirectly.”,. That distinction roughly tracks the one this Court has recognized between confessions that themselves incriminate a co-defendant (directly implicate) and those that become incriminating only when linked with later-introduced evidence (indirectly implicate). See. But the majority distorts that distinction beyond recognition when applying it to the facts of this case. In one blink-and-you-miss-it paragraph of analysis, the majority holds that Stillwell’s confession does not “directly” implicate Samia for two reasons. It “was redacted to avoid naming Samia.” And the redaction was “not akin to an obvious blank or the word ‘deleted.’ ” Ibid.