Schneble v. Florida/Opinion of the Court

MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST delivered the opinion of the Court.

Petitioner Schneble and his codefendant Snell were tried jointly in a Florida state court for murder. At the trial neither defendant took the stand, but police [p428] witnesses testified to certain admissions made by each defendant implicating both of them in the murder. Both defendants were convicted, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed. This Court vacated and remanded the case for further consideration in the light of Bruton v. United States, 391 U.S. 123 (1968). Schneble v. Florida, 392 U.S. 298 (1968). Upon remand, the Supreme Court of Florida reversed Snell's conviction, finding that it had been obtained in violation of Bruton, but affirmed petitioner's conviction. We again granted certiorari, limited to the question of whether petitioner's conviction had been obtained in violation of the Bruton rule. In the circumstances of this case, we find that any violation of Bruton that may have occurred at petitioner's trial was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. We therefore affirm.

The State's case showed that a threesome consisting of petitioner, Snell, and the victim, Mrs. Maxine Collier, left New Orleans in a borrowed automobile en route to Florida. While they were traveling across the Florida Panhandle, Mrs. Collier was murdered, and her body placed in the trunk of the automobile. The body was then transported in the car to the environs of Tampa, where it was left behind some bushes in a trash dump. Petitioner and Snell then continued their odyssey southward to the Florida Keys, and thence north along the east coast of Florida. They were apprehended for unrelated offenses in West Palm Beach, but upon discovering blood in the trunk of the car police officers there [p429] commenced the investigation that ultimately led to the charging of petitioner and Snell with the murder of Mrs. Collier.

The investigating officers testified at the trial that petitioner initially, while admitting knowledge of the murder, claimed that Snell had shot Mrs. Collier while petitioner was away from the car taking a walk. Petitioner later conceded, however, that his earlier story was false. He admitted to the police that it was he who had strangled Mrs. Collier, and that Snell had finally shot her in the head as she lay dying. The state court held these admissions of petitioner to be voluntary and admissible. Since our grant of certiorari here was limited to the Bruton issue, our treatment of that question assumes that these admissions were properly before the trial court.

One of the investigating officers also related at trial a statement made to him by Snell. Petitioner challenges this testimony as violative of Bruton, since Snell did not take the stand and thus was not available for cross-examination. According to the testimony of this officer, Snell said petitioner had occupied the rear seat of the car and had never left Snell alone in the car with Mrs. Collier during the trip. While Snell's statement fell far short of the type of comprehensive and detailed confession made by petitioner, it did tend to undermine petitioner's initial (but later abandoned) claim that he had left Snell alone during the time at which the murder occurred. Snell's statement also placed petitioner in the position in the car from which the victim could more easily have been strangled. Thus, petitioner claims, the introduction of Snell's out-of-court statement, not subject to effective cross-examination, deprived petitioner of his right of confrontation in violation of Bruton.

The Court held in Bruton that the admission of a confession of a codefendant who did not take the stand deprived the defendant of his rights under the [p430] Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause, when that confession implicated the defendant. Even when the jury is instructed to consider the confession only against the declarant, the Court in Bruton determined that the danger of misuse of the confession by the jury was too great to be constitutionally permissible. Bruton was held to be retroactive in Roberts v. Russell, 392 U.S. 293 (1968), and thus applies to the instant case even though it was tried more than two years prior to Bruton.

The mere finding of a violation of the Bruton rule in the course of a trial, however, does not automatically require reversal of the ensuring criminal conviction. In some cases the properly admitted evidence of guilt is so overwhelming, and the prejudicial effect of the codefendant's admission is so insignificant by comparison, that it is clear beyond a reasonable doubt that the improper use of the admission was harmless error.

In Harrington v. California, 395 U.S. 250 (1969), the defendant was tried for murder jointly with three others. As in the instant case, he admitted being at the scene of the crime, but denied complicity. One of his codefendants, who confessed and implicated him, took the stand and was subject to cross-examination. The other two codefendants, whose statements corroborated defendant's presence at the scene of the crime, did not take the stand. Noting the overwhelming evidence of Harrington's guilt, and the relatively insignificant prejudicial impact of these codefendants' statements, the Court held that any violation of Bruton that had occurred was harmless error.

In the instant case, petitioner's confession was minutely detailed and completely consistent with the objective evidence. He informed police of the precise location at which they ultimately located the body, and guided them to this out-of-the-way spot. Although petitioner initially tried to put the sole blame on Snell, [p431] this version of the facts did not satisfactorily explain certain deep rope burns on petitioner's hands. When confronted with the fact of the rope burns, petitioner admitted that he and Snell had plotted to kill Mrs. Collier in order to steal her money and the automobile.

Petitioner confessed that he had strangled Mrs. Collier with a plastic cord, and recounted the commission of the crime in minute and grisly detail culminating in Snell's shooting the victim in the head because she still showed signs of life after the strangulation. These details of petitioner's later account of the offense were internally consistent, were corroborated by other objective evidence, and were not contradicted by any other evidence in the case. They were consistently reiterated by petitioner on several occasions after his first exposition of them.

Not only is the independent evidence of guilt here overwhelming, as in Harrington, but the allegedly inadmissible statements of Snell at most tended to corroborate certain details of petitioner's comprehensive confession. True, under the judge's charge, the jury might have found the confession involuntary and therefore inadmissible. But this argument proves too much; without Schneble's confession and the resulting discovery of the body, the State's case against Schneble was virtually nonexistent. The remaining evidence in the case—the disappearance of Mrs. Collier sometime during the trip, and Snell's statement that Schneble sat in the back seat of the car during the trip and never left Snell alone with Mrs. Collier—could not by itself convict Schneble of this or any other crime. Charged as they were by the judge that they must be "satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt" and "to a moral certainty" of Schneble's guilt before they could convict him, the jurors could on no rational hypothesis have found Schneble guilty without reliance on his confession. Judicious [p432] application of the harmless-error rule does not require that we indulge assumptions of irrational jury behavior when a perfectly rational explanation for the jury's verdict, completely consistent with the judge's instructions, stares us in the face. See Rogers v. Missouri Pacific R. Co., 352 U.S. 500, 504-505 (1957).

Having concluded that petitioner's confession was considered by the jury, we must determine on the basis of "our own reading of the record and on what seems to us to have been the probable impact... on the minds of an average jury," Harrington v. California, supra, at 254, whether Snell's admissions were sufficiently prejudicial to petitioner as to require reversal. In Bruton, the Court pointed out that "[a] defendant is entitled to a fair trial but not a perfect one." 391 U.S., at 135, quoting Lutwak v. United States, 344 U.S. 604, 619 (1953). Thus, unless there is a reasonable possibility that the improperly admitted evidence contributed to the conviction, reversal is not required. See Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 24 (1967). In this case, we conclude that the "minds of an average jury" would not have found the State's case significantly less persuasive had the testimony as to Snell's admissions been excluded. The admission into evidence of these statements, therefore, was at most harmless error.

Affirmed.