From The New York Times, June 13, 2006

By Linda Greenhouse

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that new evidence about a long-ago murder in rural Tennessee, including DNA evidence, raised sufficient doubt about who committed the crime to merit a new hearing in federal court for a man who has spent 20 years on the state's death row.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the 5-to-3 majority, called it ''the rare case,'' and it was: the first in which the Supreme Court has factored the result of modern DNA testing into the equation in re-examining a death sentence.

Justice Kennedy emphasized that the court's decision did not exonerate the inmate, Paul G. House, and that the state still had enough evidence against him to ''support an inference of guilt.'' But he said the state's case, when examined in light of the new evidence, was now sufficiently undermined so that ''it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror viewing the record as a whole would lack reasonable doubt.''

That awkward phrase, with its multiple negatives and oblique structure, is the test the court set in a 1995 decision on how a state prisoner who claimed innocence could receive a federal court hearing that would otherwise be barred by procedural obstacles.

In applying that test to Mr. House's case, the court did not make new law. Rather, the majority's goal appeared to be to show the lower federal courts how to handle such cases in the future, especially when scientific evidence is available that can undermine the prosecution's case while not completely destroying it.

''All the evidence, old and new, incriminating and exculpatory,'' must be taken into account, Justice Kennedy said. When an inmate comes to federal court with evidence of innocence, he continued, ''the court's function is not to make an independent factual determination about what likely occurred, but rather to assess the likely impact of the evidence on reasonable jurors.''

Peter J. Neufeld, a co-director of the Innocence Project, a legal clinic at the Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan, said on Monday that the broader significance of the case was to demonstrate the court's increased sensitivity to the power of scientific evidence to reveal wrongful convictions. In an interview, Mr. Neufeld said the decision showed how an entire prosecution could be called into question if one aspect was undermined.

The decision was also a reminder that the Rehnquist court's fault lines have not been erased in the Roberts era, with Justice Kennedy continuing to play a crucial, central role.

The three justices who dissented, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, did not dispute the majority's legal conclusions so much as its interpretation of the facts. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who was not yet on the court when the case was argued in January, did not vote.

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Roberts reviewed in considerable detail much of the evidence that Justice Kennedy canvassed in the majority opinion.

Chief Justice Roberts said the court should have given more deference to the conclusions of the Federal District Court in Chattanooga, which held a hearing in 1996 and rejected Mr. House's claim of innocence after considering his new evidence.

''By casting aside the district court's factual determinations made after a comprehensive evidentiary hearing, the majority has done little more than reiterate the factual disputes presented below,'' Chief Justice Roberts said, adding, ''Witnesses do not testify in our courtroom, and it is not our role to make credibility findings and construct theories.''

The specific question for the Supreme Court in this case, House v. Bell, No. 04-8990, was whether the inmate was entitled to an exception to the general rule that legal issues not properly presented to the state courts are forfeited and may not be brought to federal court through a petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

In a 1995 case, Schlup v. Delo, the Supreme Court opened what it called a ''gateway'' through this barrier to enable an inmate with a plausible claim of innocence, based on newly discovered evidence, to get before a federal judge and thus prevent a ''manifest injustice.'' The gateway, the court said then, was reserved for the ''truly extraordinary'' case in which the inmate could present evidence that undermined confidence in the jury's verdict.

In his opinion on Monday, Justice Kennedy identified three aspects of Mr. House's case that, taken as a whole, qualified him to pass through the gateway to a habeas corpus hearing in federal district court.

One was the DNA evidence, which excluded Mr. House as the source of semen found on the murder victim, Carolyn Muncey. The case against Mr. House, who was convicted in 1986, a year after Mrs. Muncey was killed in 1985, was circumstantial. The prosecution's theory was that he killed Mrs. Muncey, a neighbor, in the course of raping her. An earlier, much cruder test had identified him as a possible source of the semen. The DNA test showed the semen to be from Mrs. Muncey's husband.

''When the only direct evidence of sexual assault drops out of the case,'' Justice Kennedy said, ''so, too, does a central theme in the state's narrative linking House to the crime.''

Justice Kennedy said that new evidence linking the husband, William Hubert Muncey Jr., to the crime was another important part of the picture. Mr. House presented two witnesses who testified that they heard Mr. Muncey make a drunken confession around the time of Mr. House's trial, along with another witness who said she saw Mr. Muncey hit his wife on the night of the murder.

At the trial, the prosecution told the jury that Mrs. Muncey's blood had been found on Mr. House's blue jeans. Mr. House's new evidence raised the prospect that the blood had been spattered from a mishandled vial of Mrs. Muncey's blood. Justice Kennedy said that the ''evidentiary disarray'' on this question would have prevented ''reasonable jurors,'' had they known of it, ''from placing significant reliance on the blood evidence.''