Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/558bv.pdf
Page Number: 295.0

134 

McDANIEL  v.  BROWN 

Per Curiam 

To  be  sure,  the  court’s  Jackson  analysis  relied  substan­
tially upon a concession made by the State in state postcon­
viction  proceedings  that  “absent  the  DNA  ﬁndings,  there 
was  insufﬁcient  evidence  to  convict  [Troy]  of  the  crime.” 
App. 1180.  But that concession posited a situation in which 
there  was  no  DNA  evidence  at  all,6  not  a  situation  in  which 
some pieces of testimony regarding the DNA evidence were 
called into question.  In sum, the Court of Appeals’ analysis 
failed  to  preserve  “the  factﬁnder’s  role  as  weigher  of  the 
evidence”  by  reviewing  “all  of  the  evidence  .  .  .  in  the  light 
most  favorable  to  the  prosecution,”  Jackson,  supra,  at  319, 
and  it  further  erred  in  ﬁnding  that  the  Nevada  Supreme 
Court’s  resolution  of  the  Jackson  claim  was  objectively 
unreasonable. 

IV 

Resolution of the Jackson claim does not end our consider­
ation of this case because respondent asks us to afﬁrm on an 
alternative ground.  He contends the two errors “in describ­
ing  the  statistical  meaning”  of  the  DNA  evidence  rendered 
his trial fundamentally unfair and denied him due process of 
law.  Brief  for  Respondent  4.  Because  the  Ninth  Circuit 
held that “the admission of Romero’s unreliable and mislead­
ing  testimony  violated  [respondent’s]  due  process  rights,” 
525  F.  3d,  at  797,  and  in  respondent’s  view  merely  applied 
Jackson  (erroneously)  to  determine  whether  that  error  was 
harmless,  he  asks  us  to  afﬁrm  the  judgment  below  on  the 
basis  of  what  he  calls  his  “DNA  due  process”  claim,  Brief 
for Respondent 35. 

As  respondent  acknowledges,  in  order  to  prevail  on  this 
claim, he would have to show that the state court’s adjudica­

6 The  concession  was  made  in  the  context  of  proceedings  in  which  re­
spondent  argued  that  competent  counsel  would  have  objected  to  the 
admissibility  of  the  DNA  evidence  on  a  number  of  grounds—including 
Romero’s  qualiﬁcations,  chain-of-custody  problems,  and  failure  to  follow 
the  proper  testing  protocol—and  might  have  successfully  excluded  the 
DNA evidence altogether.  See App. 1099–1100.