Samia v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled that a co-defendant's confession, modified to replace the accused's name with a neutral phrase like 'the other person,' can be introduced at a joint trial as long as jurors are instructed to consider it only against the person who made it.
The decision keeps intact the long-standing Bruton rule barring confessions that expressly name a co-defendant, but holds that genuinely neutral substitutions fall on the permissible side of the constitutional line — a distinction the dissenters called a blueprint for evading Bruton entirely.
“The Confrontation Clause ensures that defendants have the opportunity to confront witnesses against them, but it does not provide a freestanding guarantee against the risk of potential prejudice that may arise inferentially in a joint trial.”
The majority's statement of what the Confrontation Clause does and does not protect in a joint trial.
How it got here: The federal trial court admitted the modified confession with a limiting instruction and convicted Samia; the Second Circuit affirmed; the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Adam Samia was tried alongside two co-defendants, Joseph Hunter and Carl Stillwell, for the murder-for-hire of a real-estate broker in the Philippines. Stillwell confessed to federal agents after his arrest, admitting he drove the van where the victim was killed and stating that Samia had pulled the trigger. Because Stillwell would not testify at trial, the government asked a DEA agent to recount the confession while replacing Samia's name with phrases like "the other person." Samia maintained his innocence throughout.
The question before the Court
At a joint murder trial, can prosecutors use one defendant's confession — reworded to say "the other person" instead of naming his co-defendant — along with a jury instruction to ignore it when judging the co-defendant?
The Court's answer
No — the Confrontation Clause was not violated. A co-defendant's confession that avoids directly naming the accused, and is accompanied by a proper instruction telling jurors to consider it only against the person who confessed, does not cross the constitutional line. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to confront witnesses "against" a defendant; when a jury is told a statement may not be used against someone, that statement is ordinarily not considered a witness "against" that person at all.
The Court's prior decisions draw a firm boundary between confessions that "directly" implicate a co-defendant — triggering the constitutional bar — and those that implicate someone only indirectly. A confession that expressly names a co-defendant, or uses an obvious placeholder like a blank space or the word "deleted," falls on the prohibited side. A confession that replaces the name with a genuinely neutral phrase — here, "the other person" — falls on the permissible side, where the presumption that jurors follow limiting instructions holds.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Prosecutors in joint criminal trials can now use a co-defendant's confession — even one that effectively points at the other defendant — so long as they swap in a neutral descriptor rather than the defendant's name or an obvious placeholder like "deleted." Defense lawyers can no longer argue that such modified confessions trigger the constitutional bar simply because the jury could figure out who is meant.
What changes now
Samia's conviction and life-plus-ten-year sentence stand. Going forward, federal and state prosecutors can introduce a nontestifying co-defendant's confession at a joint trial by replacing the accused's name with a neutral descriptor — and need not seek severance or forgo the confession entirely. The Bruton rule survives but applies only to confessions that directly name the accused or use obvious symbols of omission; cases where juries could inferentially identify the accused through neutral language no longer trigger the constitutional bar.
What this does not decide
The Court explicitly declines to address whether rewriting a confession (rather than simply deleting portions of it) is itself a constitutionally acceptable method of redaction. The ruling also does not address what result would follow if a different neutral descriptor, in different circumstances, were just as obviously accusatory as a blank space — that question remains open.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Barrett
Justice Barrett agreed with the outcome and with all parts of the majority opinion except Part II-A, which traces historical evidentiary practice. She argued that the cited history — mostly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries — comes too late to shed light on the Confrontation Clause's original meaning, and that the cases address hearsay rules, not the constitutional right of confrontation. In her view, the majority overclaims what the historical record actually shows, and the Court would do better to acknowledge the history as inconclusive rather than present it as meaningful support.
Dissent — Justice Kagan
“In so elevating form over substance, the majority permits an end-run around our precedent and undermines a vital constitutional protection for the accused.”The dissent's core objection to the majority drawing a constitutional line based on word choice rather than a confession's inculpatory effect.
Justice Kagan argued that the majority elevates form over substance, drawing a constitutionally meaningless line between obvious placeholders like 'deleted' and neutral ones like 'the other person.' Bruton's application has always turned on a confession's likely inculpatory impact on the jury — not on the precise words used to conceal the defendant's identity. On the facts here, any juror would have immediately recognized that 'the other person' was Samia. The dissent warned that the decision gives prosecutors a simple workaround that renders Bruton's protection a shell of its former self.
Dissent — Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson joined Justice Kagan's dissent in full and wrote separately to stress that the majority has inverted the constitutional framework. Under Crawford v. Washington, a testimonial statement from an unavailable declarant is inadmissible by default unless there was a prior chance to cross-examine — so the default presumption should have been exclusion, with admissibility as the narrow exception requiring justification. By framing Bruton as a narrow exception to a default rule of admissibility, the majority turns the Sixth Amendment's confrontation guarantee on its head.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Confrontation Clause bans introduction of out-of-court 'testimonial' statements — such as a formal, Miranda-waived police confession — unless the person who made the statement is unavailable and the accused previously had a chance to cross-examine that person. Stillwell's confession is plainly testimonial, so it falls within the Clause's reach and requires justification.
- The Clause, however, only applies to witnesses 'against the accused.' The Court's established rule (Richardson v. Marsh, 1987) is that when jurors are instructed to consider a statement only against the person who made it — not against a co-defendant — that statement is ordinarily not treated as a witness 'against' the co-defendant. This rule rests on the legal system's presumption that jurors attend to and follow limiting instructions.
- Historical practice from the 1800s through early 1900s confirmed this approach: courts admitted nontestifying co-defendants' confessions at joint trials subject to a limiting instruction, sometimes omitting the other defendant's name and sometimes not. That longstanding practice supports the general rule.
- Bruton v. United States (1968) created a narrow exception: when a confession expressly names a co-defendant as an accomplice, a limiting instruction cannot cure the problem. The risk that jurors will nonetheless use the confession against the named person is simply too great to ignore, given the confession's vivid, direct accusatory force.
- Gray v. Maryland (1998) extended Bruton slightly — obvious placeholders like a blank space or the word 'deleted' are essentially the same as using a name, because a juror needs only to glance at the co-defendant sitting at the table to know who is meant. The Court drew this line at 'directly accusatory' confessions, while leaving undisturbed Richardson's rule that confessions incriminating only through inference from later-introduced evidence do not trigger Bruton.
- Stillwell's modified confession — using 'the other person' rather than Samia's name or an obvious symbol of omission — fell on the Richardson side of the line, not the Bruton/Gray side. The neutral phrasing was not an obvious signal of redaction that would prompt jurors to immediately finger Samia. Extending Bruton further, as Samia urged, would effectively require separate trials any time prosecutors want to use a co-defendant's confession, a result the Court has already called too high a price given the vital role joint trials play in the justice system.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Bruton v. United States (391 U.S. 123)
Bruton bars confessions expressly naming a co-defendant; it does not bar confessions using neutral descriptors like 'the other person.'
Reaffirms Richardson v. Marsh (481 U.S. 200)
Confessions that incriminate a co-defendant only through inference from other evidence remain outside Bruton's rule.
Distinguishes Gray v. Maryland (523 U.S. 185)
Gray barred only confessions with obvious omission markers like blanks or 'deleted'; neutral substitute phrases fall on the permissible side.