Supreme Court Narrows the Right to Confront One’s Accuser in Joint Trials

The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the conviction of an American who participated in a plot to assassinate a real estate agent in the Philippines in 2012, rejecting his claim that his constitutional rights had been violated in allowing testimony about a confession from an accomplice.

The plaintiff, Adam Samia, was sentenced to life in prison plus 10 years after his conviction, along with two co-defendants, in a 2018 trial involving a murder-for-hire scheme. During the trial, the judge allowed the jury to hear about the post-arrest confession of one of the other defendants who said he had been driving a van when Mr. Samia had shot the woman in it.

The judge allowed a federal agent to describe that confession on the witness stand on the condition that phrases like “another person” be substituted for Mr. Samia’s name. The judge also instructed the jury to consider the account of the confession as admissible as evidence only against the defendant who had made it.

After all three of the defendants were convicted, Mr. Samia appealed. His lawyers argued that the context had made clear to the jury that the other “person” was him, and permitting jurors to hear that claim violated his Sixth Amendment right to confront his accuser, since the co-defendant did not testify and there was no opportunity to cross-examine him.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said that the trial judge’s solution was a reasonable compromise for situations in which there is a joint trial for a set of defendants, and the confession of one indirectly implicated another defendant.

“The confrontation clause ensures that defendants have the opportunity to confront witnesses against them, but it does not provide a free-standing guarantee against the risk of potential prejudice that may arise inferentially in a joint trial,” Justice Thomas wrote.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s Republican appointees in the majority and its Democratic appointees in dissent.

The case centered on a lurid plot in which prosecutors said a transnational crime lord, Paul LeRoux, tasked Mr. Samia, who was then working for him as a soldier of fortune, and two other men with killing Catherine Lee, a real estate broker who Mr. LeRoux believed had stolen from him. She was shot twice in the head and her body was dumped on a pile of garbage.

The Drug Enforcement Administration later arrested them, and in 2018, federal prosecutors in New York charged Mr. Samia and two others, Joseph Hunter and Carl Stillwell. They also introduced at trial the confession that Mr. Stillwell, who did not testify, had made to federal agents after his arrest.

The agent testified that Mr. Stillwell had “described a time when the other person he was with pulled the trigger on that woman in a van that he and Mr. Stillwell was driving.” But there was little doubt who that “other person” was. In opening statements, prosecutors had said that Mr. Stillwell drove the van while Mr. Samia, in the passenger seat, had turned around and shot Ms. Lee.

In a 10-page dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, argued that the majority had gutted a 1968 precedent that said a defendant’s rights were violated in similar circumstances, except that the description of a co-defendant’s confession referred to the defendant by name.

Under Friday’s ruling, Justice Kagan wrote, prosecutors can circumvent the protections of the 1968 precedent in joint trials by swapping out a defendant’s name in an account of another defendant’s confession.

“But contrary to today’s decision, the serious Sixth Amendment problem remains,” she wrote. “Now, defendants in joint trials will not have the chance to confront some of the most damaging witnesses against them. And a constitutional right once guaranteeing that opportunity will no longer. It will become, in joint trials, a shell of its former self.”