What Today’s DNA Case Is and Is Not About

Iocaste here, belatedly fulfilling my guest-blogging duties. This one is more for the non-lawyers among you.

If you only read the headlines, you’d think that the Supreme Court has held that you get the right to a new trial – or at least the right to argue that you deserve a new trial – if you can present DNA evidence suggesting that you didn’t commit the crime.

You would be wrong.

Habeas corpus is a process by which a convicted prisoner gets to go to court to say that errors in his trial led to his convinction and, as a result, he should either get a new trial or be set free. “Errors” usually means some kind of constitutional violation, like prosecutorial misconduct, or faulty jury instructions, or ineffective assistance of counsel, or any of a zillion things that can go wrong and prejudice a defendant.

But, as I’ve previously posted on my own blog, the world of habeas corpus is nasty, brutish, and long. It’s a hideously complicated process and most of the time, inmates never get their claims in front of a federal court because they’ve defaulted them in some way. Usually, the prisoner is found to have “waived” his constitutional claim because he didn’t raise it earlier in the process. Like, say, maybe he didn’t object to the jury instructions at trial, when he first had the chance. So, the federal court says, “Sorry – if you wanted that claim heard, you should have said something earlier, and now you’re plumb out of luck.”

That’s where the DNA evidence comes in. In a case called Schlup v. Delo (1995), the Supreme Court held that if you can make a showing of actual innocence, that’s good enough to get around a procedurally defaulted constitutional claim.

In other words, showing that you’re innocent does not get you a new trial. What it does get you is an excuse to have your constitutional claim heard, and it’s the constitutional claim that will, or will not, get you a new trial.

So, in the case decided today, the defendant, House, raised various constitutional claims, including ineffective assistance of counsel and prosecutorial misconduct. But the federal courts refused to consider his claims because he had not raised them earlier in the process. So he argued, “Look, I’ve got this DNA evidence, and evidence that the bloodstains were a result of police contamination, and other stuff, besides. I might be actually innocent. Isn’t that enough to let you at least listen to my argument about whether my trial was screwed up for completely independent reasons?”

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said – well, no. That is, said the court, I just don’t think your DNA evidence, and the evidence of that the bloodstains were a result of police contamination, is good enough to get your other claims heard.

The Supreme Court reversed, holding that the new DNA evidence and House’s other evidence made it “more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found petitioner guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

And what was this new DNA evidence?

According to the Supreme Court, a central element of the prosecution’s case at trial was evidence that semen on the nightgown of the victim was consistent with the defendant’s semen. DNA evidence proved, however, that the semen belonged to her husband. As the Supreme Court put it:

[I]n direct contradiction of evidence presented at trial, DNA testing has established that the semen on Mrs. Muncey’s nightgown and panties came from her husband, Mr. Muncey, not from House. The State, though conceding this point, insists this new evidence is immaterial. At the guilt phase at least, neither sexual contact nor motive were elements of the offense, so in the State’s view the evidence, or lack of evidence, of sexual assault or sexual advance is of no consequence. We disagree. In fact we consider the new disclosure of central importance.

From beginning to end the case is about who committed the crime. When identity is in question, motive is key. The point, indeed, was not lost on the prosecution, for it introduced the evidence and relied on it in the final guilt-phase closing argument. Referring to “evidence at the scene,” the prosecutor suggested that House committed, or attempted to commit, some “indignity” on Mrs. Muncey that neither she “nor any mother on that road would want to do with Mr. House.” 9 Tr. 1302-1303. Particularly in a case like this where the proof was, as the State Supreme Court observed, circumstantial, we think a jury would have given this evidence great weight. Quite apart from providing proof of motive, it was the only forensic evidence at the scene that would link House to the murder.

Law and society, as they ought to do, demand accountability when a sexual offense has been committed, so not only did this evidence link House to the crime; it likely was a factor in persuading the jury not to let him go free. At sentencing, moreover, the jury came to the unanimous conclusion, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the murder was committed in the course of a rape or kidnaping. The alleged sexual motivation relates to both those determinations. This is particularly so given that, at the sentencing phase, the jury was advised that House had a previous conviction for sexual assault.

And, as I said, in addition to the DNA evidence, House was able to discredit other evidence that had been presented at his trial, like bloodstain evidence. And to present a convincing case that the husband committed the crime.

But all of this, mind, was only good enough to allow him to be heard on his actual claims – which had nothing to do with any of this stuff.

(Well, I don’t know the substance of his legal claims – he might be bootstrapping, you know, arguing that evidence of the husband’s involvement was suppressed by the prosecutor, and this constituted prosecutorial misconduct, and the misconduct forms the basis for his legal claim … but, as a legal matter, there is no necessary connection between the innocence claim and the constitutional claims. I.e., under the current legal standards, I would rely on the same DNA evidence in order to get my claim of faulty jury instructions heard, even though one thing has nothing to do with the other.)

The Supreme Court went out of its way to emphasize this point. House’s evidence was good enough to excuse the procedural default, but the Court left open the question whether any prisoner, ever, can get habeas relief solely based on a showing of actual innocence, without any kind of underlying constitutional violation. In other words, if your trial is basically a fair one, but 20 years later new evidence turns up proving your innocence, it’s not at all clear that you can petition for habeas.

What the Supreme Court did say is that even if you can seek habeas relief based solely upon a showing of actual innocence – without anything more – House’s evidence here would not have been good enough. As the Court put it:

[W]hatever burden a hypothetical freestanding innocence claim would require, this petitioner has not satisfied it. To be sure, House has cast considerable doubt on his guilt — doubt sufficient to satisfy Schlup‘s gateway standard for obtaining federal review despite a state procedural default. … [A]t the least [any freestanding actual innocence claim] requires more convincing proof of innocence than Schlup. It follows, given the closeness of the Schlup question here, that House’s showing falls short of the threshold …

To sum: House’s new evidence made it “more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found petitioner guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” But that’s not enough to get him a new trial. Nay, he only gets a new trial if his other claims – ineffective assistance of counsel, faulty jury instructions, whatev – are sufficiently meritorious to justify it. The innocence claim was, in legal parlance, merely a “gateway” to have his other claims heard.

And, yet again, welcome to the wonderful world of habeas corpus. You can totally see how we need to pass new legislation to make it even harder for defendants to bring their claims to federal court.