The Supreme Court upheld a California man’s murder conviction Monday even though jurors did not hear from a witness who overheard someone else confess to the killing.

The Court, in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, sidestepped the issue of whether the exclusion substantially affected jury deliberations or the verdict in the case of John Fry, who was convicted in 1995 of shooting two people to death alongside a highway in Vacaville, Calif.