Court Opinion

ID: 9494570
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:40:26.194722+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:28.487548
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Emanuel Sistrunk has served almost fifteen years for a crime he probably did not commit. Sistrunk was convicted of raping Jane Roe,* an eleven-year-old girl. Roe testified that the crime occurred in a garage owned by a third party unconnected to either Sistrunk or herself. No one else saw Sistrunk with the victim, or anywhere near the garage on the day of the crime. The prosecution presented no semen, blood, hair, DNA or fibers connecting Sis-trunk to the crime. A trench coat allegedly worn by the perpetrator, and used by *1182Mm during the crime, was never recovered. The prosecution’s entire case hinged on Roe’s testimony and her identification of Sistrunk as the rapist.
The testimony of a victim — particularly a very young one — is a highly tenuous ground on which to rest a conviction. A jury might develop a reasonable doubt from the total absence of corroborating evidence. If the jury nevertheless convicts, we are bound by that determination. However, when the state’s case is so heavily dependent on a single witness, errors affecting the witness’s credibility take on enormous significance. Here, there is strong reason to believe that the jury’s decision to believe Roe beyond a reasonable doubt was heavily influenced by the false testimony of a prosecution expert. Moreover, the trial court improperly denied defendant the opportunity to present evidence that would have undermined the victim’s credibility. I don’t share the majority’s confidence that the jury would have convicted anyway; no reasonable jury would have convicted defendant but for these serious errors.
The expert witness issue is clear-cut and dispositive. Admission of the expert’s testimony was highly questionable to begin with. The expert had nothing to say about the crime, nor about any connection Sis-trunk might have had to it. Her only function was to lend credence to Roe’s testimony. To that end, Dr. Jan Bays** testified about a supposedly scientific study she had conducted which- — she claimed — showed that “it is very, very rare that a child lies about sex abuse” and “never with the younger children.” Supplanting the jury’s fact-finding responsibilities by anointing the prosecution’s star witness with the aura of scientific infallibility is highly suspect. See State v. Middleton, 294 Or. 427, 657 P.2d 1215, 1219 (1983). However, Sistrunk was aware of this issue at the time of trial, and it therefore can’t form the basis for -passage through the Schlup gateway. See Schlup v. Delo, 513 U.S. 298, 115 S.Ct. 851, 130 L.Ed.2d 808 (1995).
What is new is the discovery that the expert lied. As the majority bluntly puts it, the “study” in question “does not say what Dr. Bays testified that it said, nor is it a scientific study establishing anything at all.” Maj. Op. at 1177. In other words, the expert fabricated the supposedly scientific proof on which she relied in persuading the jury that the prosecution’s witness was being truthful. We have here not merely improper vouching, not merely supplanting of the jury by an expert, but doing so by means of perjury. Because the prosecution’s case against Sistrunk depended on having the jury believe that the complaining witness was both accurate and truthful, I cannot agree that Dr. Bays’s testimony was merely “icing on the cake.” Id. at 1181. Jurors seldom have experience with sexually abused children. If an expert testifies, based on an allegedly scientific study, that such children never lie, jurors would be hard put to reach the opposite conclusion.
The problem of the expert’s false vouching was compounded when the trial judge improperly prevented petitioner from gathering and introducing evidence that would have undermined the complaining witness’s credibility. Roe testified that her assailant had a bumpy penis. As the jury could easily observe, petitioner suffers from neurofibromatosis, which creates bumps or lumps in his skin. The most plausible interpretation of Roe’s statement is that she saw her assailant’s penis, and that it had the types of bumps the jury could plainly see on visible portions of defendant’s body. The clear inference the jury could draw is that petitioner was the *1183assailant because he must have a bumpy penis.
Petitioner sought to introduce a photograph of his erect penis showing that it has no bumps. This would have been strong graphic evidence that the complaining witness was confused or untruthful. The trial court refused to allow defense counsel to take such a photograph, describing the necessary arrangements as “cumbersome” and the evidence as “misleading and confusing.” Because the evidence would have been highly relevant and easily procured, I can imagine nothing except the trial judge’s personal prissiness that could have motivated his decision to prohibit it. But when a man’s life is at stake — and to an adult man, a thirty-year sentence pretty much is life' — -the judge’s personal distaste for the evidence cannot be a sufficient reason to prevent the jury from seeing it.
New evidence, consisting of a medical examination performed after trial, discloses “no fibromas of [Sistrunk’s] external genitalia”; in other words, his penis isn’t bumpy, just as the photograph would have shown. The substitute of allowing petitioner’s girlfriend to testify as to the appearance of his penis was plainly inadequate. The jury could have inferred that the girlfriend was biased in his favor and would tailor her testimony accordingly; they may have wondered why petitioner did not present a photograph or the result of a medical exam. Allowing petitioner to present the photograph would have forced the jury to consider whether the young witness had guessed that petitioner must have bumps on hir penis and embellished her story to make herself more credible.
The supposedly corroborating evidence that my colleagues find so persuasive does nothing to cure these problems affecting the credibility of the prosecution’s principal witness. Evidence that the witness had suffered some trauma to her vagina merely proves that someone may have raped her; in no way does it confirm her identification of petitioner as the assailant. The same is true of her description of the garage and the bizarre story of the five dollars petitioner supposedly gave her after the rape. It may be that whatever sexual assault Roe suffered happened in the garage in question, but nothing of petitioner’s was found in or near the garage, so her knowledge of the garage does nothing to tie petitioner to her story. The five dollar payment may or may not support the claim of rape, but it does nothing to point the finger at petitioner any more than at anyone else who might have had five dollars in his pocket on the day in question.
As the majority recognizes, we held in Carriger v. Stewart, 132 F.3d 463, 477-78 (9th Cir.1997), that a petitioner can pass through the Schlwp gateway with evidence that undermines a key witness’s testimony. The prosecution’s case against Carriger was much stronger than that against Sis-trunk. For one thing, there was no doubt that a crime had been committed: The victim was found dead, tied up, bludgeoned and strangled. Here, by contrast, it’s unclear that a rape occurred, as no semen or pubic hair were found on the victim’s body; Roe may have injured herself some other way. In Carriger, there was strong circumstantial proof that petitioner had participated in the crime, because his fingerprint was found on the adhesive tape that bound the victim’s body. Here, there is nothing at all, other than the word of the victim, to connect petitioner to whatever crime did occur. In Carriger, the en banc court held that impeachment of the principal witness’s testimony was sufficient to satisfy Schlup. Carriger, 132 F.3d at 478. This must be doubly true here, where the witness’s testimony was the whole of the government’s case against petitioner, and the so-called expert who vouched for that *1184testimony lied through her teeth. If petitioner cannot pass through the Schlup gateway, there is no gateway.
We have here a miscarriage of justice. No reasonable jury would have convicted petitioner in a trial free of the serious errors affecting the complaining witness’s credibility. Because I cannot join my colleagues in their contrary conclusion, I respectfully dissent.

 Not her real name.

 Her real name.