Williams v. Illinois
The Supreme Court allowed prosecutors to use a state expert witness to explain a DNA match with an outside lab's report, even though the outside lab's own analyst never testified or faced cross-examination.
The five-justice majority splintered badly over why that testimony was permissible, leaving no single rationale that commands a majority, so lower courts and future litigants have little clear guidance about when forensic experts can rely on lab reports the defendant never got to confront.
How it got here: A state trial judge convicted the defendant after a bench trial; Illinois's appellate court and supreme court both affirmed, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the confrontation issue.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A young woman was abducted and raped in Chicago. Hospital staff collected a rape-testing kit, and police sent vaginal swabs to an outside lab, Cellmark, for DNA testing. Years later, a state forensic scientist compared the DNA profile Cellmark produced to a profile taken from a man later charged with the rape, and testified at his bench trial that the profiles matched, though no one from Cellmark ever testified.
The question before the Court
Could a prosecutor have its own DNA expert describe an outside lab's report and testify to a match, without ever putting that lab's analyst on the stand?
Why it matters
Crime labs and prosecutors can keep using DNA results produced by outside labs without calling every technician who worked on them, at least in cases like this one. But because no single rationale won five votes, courts, prosecutors, and defense lawyers remain uncertain exactly which forensic-testimony practices the Confrontation Clause allows or forbids going forward.
What changes now
The conviction stands, since the Illinois courts' rulings are affirmed. But because the plurality, Justice Thomas's concurrence, and the dissent all reasoned differently, no single legal rule commands five votes, so how the Confrontation Clause applies to future forensic-expert testimony about outside lab reports remains genuinely unsettled, and lower courts will have to work through these separate opinions case by case.
What this does not decide
No opinion in this case commanded five votes for one legal rule. The plurality's 'not offered for truth' and 'not testimonial' theories, and Justice Thomas's separate 'lacks solemnity' theory, are each backed by only four or one justice, so this decision does not establish a single clear standard for when forensic experts may describe an unconfronted lab report.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer joined the plurality in full but wrote separately to say the Court had not adequately answered the broader question of how the Confrontation Clause applies to multi-technician crime lab reports, and would have set the case for reargument. Absent that, he adhered to his dissenting views in Melendez-Diaz and Bullcoming and reasoned that accredited lab reports like Cellmark's are presumptively nontestimonial business records.
Concurrence — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas agreed the testimony was admissible but rejected the plurality's reasoning entirely, siding largely with the dissent's critique of it. He concluded Cellmark's report was not 'testimonial' only because it lacked the sworn, certified formality and solemnity that mark true testimonial statements like affidavits or depositions, not because it was offered for a non-truth purpose.
Dissent — Justice Kagan
Justice Kagan argued the case was straightforward under Melendez-Diaz and Bullcoming: the analyst's testimony functioned exactly like the barred 'surrogate testimony' in those cases, conveying Cellmark's unconfronted conclusions to the factfinder. She argued the plurality's not-for-truth rationale was a transparent dodge and that Thomas's solemnity test would let prosecutors evade confrontation by avoiding formal labels, and would have required the actual Cellmark analyst to testify.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The plurality asked whether the Confrontation Clause — the Sixth Amendment guarantee that a criminal defendant may cross-examine the witnesses against him — bars an expert from testifying about facts underlying her opinion when those facts came from another lab's out-of-court report.
- It relied on longstanding evidence rules (Rule 703) letting an expert base an opinion on facts learned outside court, even facts not independently proven, so long as the expert isn't vouching for their truth — reasoning that if such facts aren't offered to prove their truth, the Confrontation Clause simply doesn't apply.
- Applying that framework, the plurality concluded the analyst's reference to Cellmark's profile was offered only to explain the basis of her own comparison, not to prove Cellmark's report was accurate, and because this was a bench trial, the judge was presumed able to understand that limit.
- As an independent, alternative ground, the plurality asked whether the Cellmark report, even treated as substantive evidence, would count as 'testimonial' under Crawford v. Washington — meaning made with the primary purpose of accusing a targeted person in a future prosecution.
- The plurality found the report failed that test because it was generated to identify an unknown, at-large suspect rather than to accuse a known defendant, reasoning that lab technicians producing DNA profiles typically don't know whether results will incriminate or exonerate anyone.
- Combining the two rationales, the plurality held that admitting the analyst's testimony did not create the kind of confrontation problem the Court had addressed in Crawford, Melendez-Diaz, or Bullcoming.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (557 U. S. 305)
The Court says this case differs because Cellmark's report, unlike the certified lab certificates there, was not admitted for its truth.
Distinguishes Bullcoming v. New Mexico (564 U. S. ___)
The Court distinguishes this case because the forensic report there was directly introduced to prove guilt; Cellmark's was not.
Reaffirms Crawford v. Washington (541 U. S. 36)
The Court relies on Crawford's rule that the Confrontation Clause doesn't bar statements not used to prove their truth.