McDaniel v. Brown

The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the evidence underlying a defendant’s sexual assault conviction was clearly insufficient under the 1979 case Jackson v. Virginia.

A Nevada jury convicted Troy Don Brown of two counts of sexual assault on a child under the age of 14 and one count of abuse or neglect of a child resulting in substantial bodily harm.

In his appeal, the Nevada Supreme Court rejected Brown’s contention that there was insufficient evidence to convict, but vacated the third conviction and remanded for resentencing on the second sexual assault charge. Brown was resentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 10 years on both sexual assault counts, to run consecutively.

Brown next filed his federal petition for writ of habeas corpus. The U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada granted the petition.

The decision hinged on DNA testimony given by forensic scientist Renee Romero, who testified that DNA found on the young girl’s panties matched Brown’s and she would expect such a match in only one in 3 million people in the entire population. The prosecutor asked Romero to state this another way, and she said that the chance of the DNA being from Brown was “99.99967 percent.”

In May 2008, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s grant of habeas and reversed the conviction. The 2-1 majority found that Romero’s testimony on the nearly 100 percent likelihood it was Brown created a “fallacy” that misled the jury.

“In fact, the former testimony (1 in 3 million) is the probability of a match between an innocent person selected randomly from the population; this is not the same as the probability that Troy’s DNA was the same as the DNA found in (her) underwear, which would prove his guilt,” wrote Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw.

On Jan. 26, the Supreme Court accepted the case for review.

Question presented: Whether the evidence underlying the defendant’s conviction for sexual assault was clearly insufficient under the court’s 1979 decision in Jackson v. Virginia on federal habeas review.