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Rh as an adequate substitute for petitioner’s constitutional right of cross-examination”). Then, in Gray v. Maryland, 523 U. S. 185 (1998), the Government tried again to get an exception to the Confrontation Clause—this time adding an obvious redaction of the defendant’s name in the confession on top of the limiting instruction—but this Court once again rebuffed such efforts. Id., at 188. Indeed, the only prior case in which this Court has permitted an exception to the baseline confrontation rule of exclusion was one in which the confession at issue arguably was not even “against” the defendant in the first place, as it did not incriminate the accused in any way until the defendant herself introduced evidence that rendered the confession inculpatory. Richardson v. Marsh, 481 U. S. 200, 206, 208, 211 (1987).

Collectively, our precedents properly recognize the necessary narrowness of any exception to the default Bruton principle that the Government’s introduction of an inculpatory confession during a joint trial poses a substantial constitutional problem. Not anymore. With today’s ruling, the majority fails to acknowledge what is the default rule and what is the exception. And it thereby sets the stage for considerable erosion of the Confrontation Clause right that Bruton protects.

Properly understood, the Bruton question actually raises two distinct issues: one about whether there is a Confrontation Clause problem in the first place, and a second about potential cures (like redactions and limiting instructions) for that constitutional dilemma. The majority skips over the first question today; its analysis essentially assumes that there is no Sixth Amendment problem in the first place, which then allows for an unwarranted expansion of what should be a narrow exception to the default principle of exclusion. In other words, the Court has now turned our Bruton cases on their head in a manner that risks undermining a core Sixth Amendment right.