PROFILPELAJAR.COM

Bruton v. United States
Bruton v. United States
	Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 11, 1968; Decided May 20, 1968
Full case name	Bruton v. United States
Citations	391 U.S. 123 (more) 88 S. Ct. 1620; 20 L. Ed. 2d 476
Court membership
	Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · William O. Douglas; John M. Harlan II · William J. Brennan Jr.; Potter Stewart · Byron White; Abe Fortas · Thurgood Marshall
Case opinions
Majority	Brennan, joined by Warren, Douglas, Stewart, Fortas
Concurrence	Stewart
Concurrence	Black (in judgment)
Dissent	White, joined by Harlan
Dissent	Harlan
	Marshall took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
	U.S. Const. amend. VI
	This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
	Delli Paoli v. United States, 352 U.S. 232 (1957)

Bruton v. United States, 391 U.S. 123 (1968), is a 1968 United States Supreme Court ruling in which the Court held that a defendant was deprived of his rights under the Confrontation Clause if a confession by his codefendant was introduced in their joint trial, regardless of whether the jury received instructions only to consider it against the confessor. This has become known as the Bruton rule.^[1] The case overruled Delli Paoli v. United States (1957).^[2]

Reasoning

As the basis for its holding, the Supreme Court stated that "There are some contexts in which the risk that the jury will not, or cannot, follow instructions is so great, and the consequences of failure so vital to the defendant, that the practical and human limitations of the jury system cannot be ignored. Such a context is presented here, where the powerfully incriminating extrajudicial statements of a codefendant, who stands accused side-by-side with the defendant, are deliberately spread before the jury in a joint trial. Not only are the incriminations devastating to the defendant but their credibility is inevitably suspect . . . . The unreliability of such evidence is intolerably compounded when the alleged accomplice, as here, does not testify and cannot be tested by cross-examination."^[3]