Defying DNA: Rethinking the Role of the Jury in an Age of Scientific Proof of Innocence

In 1946, public outrage erupted after a jury ordered Charlie Chaplin to support a child who, according to apparently definitive blood tests, was not his. Half a century later, juries have again defied apparently definitive evidence of innocence, finding criminal defendants guilty based on a confession or eyewitness notwithstanding exculpatory DNA test results. One might expect judges in such cases to direct an acquittal, on grounds that the evidence is legally insufficient because no rational juror could find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet few, if any, do. Instead, courts defer to juries when they form an actual belief in guilt based on testimonial evidence, however weak, and even when contradicted by highly compelling evidence of innocence. In this Article, I argue that guilty verdicts defying DNA uniquely upend three assumptions underlying this deference doctrine. First, that juries are particularly good at determining credibility, and that the public believes this to be so. Second, that reserving credibility as the province of the jury maintains systemic legitimacy by avoiding trial by machine. Third, that the reasonable doubt standard should focus on jurors' actual belief in guilt rather than solely on the quantum and quality of proof. After explaining why the deference doctrine is unjustified, I propose changes to sufficiency law that would foreclose convictions in the face of evidence difficult to reconcile with guilt, while also ensuring that judges do not place science on an epistemic pedestal or intrude upon the jury's role as voice and conscience of the community. INTRODUCTIONIt brings discredit upon the legal profession and it makes a mockery of a court of justice to permit a jury to accept or reject in accordance with their prejudices a fact capable of exact scientific determination. . . . Shades of Jeremy Bentham! What would he say of men of law who reach such stupid results-who are so arrogant and contemptuous of men of science?1The "stupid result[]" lamented by Professor Arthur John Keeffe and his colleagues in the Stanford Law Review in 1950 was the verdict in a paternity suit against Charlie Chaplin.2 The core of Chaplin's defense consisted of unchallenged blood tests excluding Chaplin as a possible father. Nonetheless, the jury found for the plaintiff based on her testimony that she slept with no other man during the relevant period, and a California appellate court upheld the verdict.3 Courts in the same era also upheld guilty verdicts in criminal cases under similar facts.4 Chaplin inspired a flurry of bad press, with the Boston Herald declaring that "California has in effect decided that black is white, two and two are five, and up is down."5Professor Keeffe might have felt similar outrage over the recent conviction of Juan Rivera. Rivera was prosecuted in Illinois for the rape and murder of a young girl despite a DNA test result excluding him as a possible source of semen in the girl's vagina. The state relied on jailhouse informant testimony and a confession given after Rivera had endured four days of unrecorded interrogation and had suffered what a nurse described as a "psychotic episode."6 The state argued to the jury that the presence of the other man's semen in the eleven-year-old victim's vagina must have resulted either from her coincidentally having had consensual sex with another man shortly before Rivera raped and killed her, or from contamination of the rape kit sample with sperm of another man sometime in the twenty-four hours after the girl's autopsy.7 The state offered no evidence of contamination, and its only evidence of consensual sex was that the girl had been forced to perform oral sex at age eight, knew how to masturbate, and was wearing "red lace panties" the day of her murder.8 The jury convicted Rivera, and the trial court denied his motion for judgment of acquittal notwithstanding the verdict.9In reporting the Rivera verdict, the New York Times decried "the prosecution's case against DNA. …