Benjamin Lee Lilly v. Virginia
527 U.S. 116, 119 S. Ct. 1887, 144 L. Ed. 2d 117 (1999)
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Rule of Law:
An accomplice’s confession that inculpates a criminal defendant does not fall within a firmly rooted exception to the hearsay rule for Confrontation Clause purposes. Such statements are presumptively unreliable and are admissible only if they possess particularized guarantees of trustworthiness, which cannot be established by corroborating evidence.
Facts:
- On December 4, 1995, Benjamin Lee Lilly, his brother Mark Lilly, and Gary Wayne Barker broke into a home and stole liquor, guns, and a safe.
- The next day, after drinking the stolen liquor, the three men robbed a country store.
- After their car broke down, they abducted Alex DeFilippis and stole his vehicle.
- The men drove DeFilippis to a deserted location, where one of them shot and killed him.
- The group then committed two additional robberies before being apprehended by police.
- During separate police interrogations, Mark Lilly admitted his involvement in the robberies but stated that his brother, Benjamin Lilly, masterminded the crimes and was the one who shot and killed DeFilippis.
- Police had told Mark Lilly that he could face a life sentence unless he broke 'family ties' and implicated his brother.
Procedural Posture:
- The Commonwealth of Virginia charged Benjamin Lilly with multiple offenses, including capital murder, and tried him separately.
- At the trial in Virginia state court, the prosecution called Mark Lilly as a witness, but he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
- The prosecution then moved to introduce Mark Lilly's taped statements to the police as a declaration against penal interest from an unavailable witness.
- The trial court overruled the defense's objection that the admission would violate the Confrontation Clause and admitted the statements in their entirety.
- A jury found Benjamin Lilly guilty of all charges, including capital murder, and he was sentenced to death.
- Lilly appealed to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which affirmed the conviction and sentence.
- The Virginia Supreme Court held that the statement against penal interest is a 'firmly rooted' hearsay exception in Virginia, and its admission therefore satisfied the Confrontation Clause.
- The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the decision.
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Issue:
Does the admission of a nontestifying accomplice’s custodial confession, which contains statements against his own penal interest but also inculpates the defendant, violate the defendant's Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause right?
Opinions:
Majority - Justice Stevens
Yes, the admission of the nontestifying accomplice's custodial confession violates the defendant's Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause right. Accomplices' confessions that inculpate a criminal defendant are not within a firmly rooted exception to the hearsay rule as defined by Confrontation Clause jurisprudence. Such statements, made in a custodial setting where the declarant has a strong motivation to shift blame, are presumptively unreliable. The Court rejected the argument that the statement's reliability was proven by other corroborating evidence, holding that trustworthiness must be inherent in the circumstances surrounding the statement itself, not 'bootstrapped' by other evidence presented at trial. Factors like being read Miranda rights or the statement being broadly self-inculpatory are insufficient to rebut the presumption of unreliability for the specific portions that inculpate another person.
Concurring - Justice Breyer
Yes, the confession's admission violates the Confrontation Clause under the Court's current framework. However, Justice Breyer writes separately to suggest that the Court's precedent of linking the Confrontation Clause so directly to the rules of hearsay is problematic and of recent vintage. He argues that this framework is both too broad and too narrow and that the Court should reexamine this connection in a future case.
Concurring - Justice Scalia
Yes, the admission of the confession is a clear constitutional violation. The introduction of Mark Lilly's custodial interrogation statements at trial, without him being available for cross-examination, is a 'paradigmatic Confrontation Clause violation.' Such formalized, testimonial materials are the core concern of the Confrontation Clause, making an elaborate analysis of hearsay exceptions unnecessary.
Concurring - Justice Thomas
Yes, the admission of the confession violated the Confrontation Clause. Justice Thomas reiterates his view that the Confrontation Clause applies to 'formalized testimonial material' like confessions. He agrees with the Chief Justice that the Court's opinion should not create a blanket ban on all accomplice statements and that the lower courts should have first analyzed the statement's trustworthiness.
Concurring - Chief Justice Rehnquist
Yes, admission of the confession violated the defendant's rights, but the majority's reasoning is too broad. The plurality should not have issued a categorical ban on all accomplice confessions that inculpate a defendant. In this specific case, the portions of Mark Lilly's statement that inculpated his brother were not genuinely against Mark's own penal interest; they were self-serving attempts to shift blame. The case should have been decided on this narrower ground and remanded for the state court to conduct the 'particularized guarantees of trustworthiness' analysis, which it had not yet done under the proper constitutional standard.
Analysis:
This case significantly narrowed the path for admitting accomplice confessions against a co-defendant. By declaring that the 'statement against penal interest' exception is not firmly rooted for this category of evidence, the Court heightened the burden on prosecutors, requiring them to prove 'particularized guarantees of trustworthiness' inherent in the statement itself. The decision also explicitly barred the use of corroborating evidence to establish such trustworthiness, reinforcing the presumption that custodial accomplice confessions are unreliable. The numerous concurring opinions, especially those of Justices Scalia and Thomas, signaled a growing dissatisfaction with the existing reliability-based framework of Ohio v. Roberts, foreshadowing the Court’s major shift to a 'testimonial' approach in Crawford v. Washington.
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