Williams v. Illinois, 567 U.S. 50 (2012), is a fractured United States Supreme Court decision that affirmed Sandy Williams’s Chicago rape conviction 5-4 but produced no majority rationale on whether the Confrontation Clause allows a prosecution expert to testify about a DNA profile generated by an absent outside analyst. The four-justice plurality said such testimony is permissible because the underlying report is not offered for its truth; Justice Thomas provided the fifth vote on a different theory; four justices dissented. Twelve years later, a unanimous Court in Smith v. Arizona (2024) rejected the plurality’s “not for the truth” reasoning and held that basis evidence conveyed through a surrogate expert does come in for its truth and is therefore governed by the Confrontation Clause.
The Question the Case Posed
A young woman identified as L.J. was abducted, raped, and robbed on a Chicago street in February 2000. A sexual-assault kit went to the Illinois State Police lab, which outsourced the DNA work to Cellmark Diagnostics Laboratory in Maryland. Cellmark produced a male DNA profile from the semen and returned a report. Months later, Sandy Williams was arrested on unrelated charges, his blood was drawn, and an ISP analyst uploaded his profile to the state database. A database search matched the Cellmark profile to Williams. L.J. later identified him in a lineup.1Justia US Supreme Court Center. Williams v. Illinois, 567 U.S. 50
At Williams’s 2006 bench trial in Cook County, the prosecution did not call anyone from Cellmark and never admitted the Cellmark report into evidence. Instead, ISP forensic specialist Sandra Lambatos testified as an expert. She told the judge she had compared the Cellmark profile against the profile from Williams’s blood and concluded that Williams “cannot be excluded as a possible source of the semen,” with a random-match probability she put at roughly 1 in 8.7 quadrillion for Black individuals.2University of North Carolina School of Government. Williams v. Illinois Analysis Lambatos had not performed or observed any of Cellmark’s testing.
Defense counsel objected on Confrontation Clause grounds. The trial judge overruled the objection under Illinois Rule of Evidence 703, which allows an expert to disclose the facts underlying an opinion.3FindLaw. Williams v. Illinois Williams was convicted and sentenced to concurrent natural-life terms for the sexual-assault counts, a consecutive 60 years for aggravated kidnapping, and a concurrent 15 years for aggravated robbery.4Illinois Appellate Court. People v. Williams, 2024 IL App (1st) 221552-U The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed, and the Supreme Court granted review.
The case tested a workaround. Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (2009) had held that forensic lab certificates are testimonial and require live analyst testimony, and Bullcoming v. New Mexico (2011) had blocked prosecutors from using a “surrogate” analyst to introduce another analyst’s report.5Cornell Law Institute. Bullcoming v. New Mexico The question in Williams was whether prosecutors could sidestep those rules by never admitting the report and instead treating it as the premise for a second expert’s opinion.
A 5-4 Vote With No Shared Reasoning
The Court affirmed on June 18, 2012, but the majority split into two camps that agreed on nothing except the result.6SCOTUSblog. Williams v. Illinois
The Plurality’s Two Grounds
Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy and Breyer, offered two independent rationales. First, the Cellmark report was not offered “for the truth of the matter asserted.” Because the report itself never went into evidence and was mentioned only to explain the basis of Lambatos’s own opinion, the plurality said it was outside the Confrontation Clause. In a bench trial, the judge could be trusted to keep the distinction straight. Second, even if the report had been in evidence, it was not “testimonial”: Cellmark tested the swabs before any suspect had been identified, with the primary purpose of catching an unknown rapist rather than incriminating a specific defendant.7Cornell Law Institute. Williams v. Illinois, 10-8505
Justice Thomas’s Concurrence
Justice Thomas supplied the fifth vote but rejected both of the plurality’s rationales. He wrote that there was “no plausible reason” for putting the Cellmark statements before the factfinder other than to prove their truth, and that state evidence rules cannot override the confrontation right. He voted to affirm on a narrower ground of his own: the Cellmark report lacked the “formality and solemnity” that, in his view, defines a testimonial statement. Because Cellmark’s report was neither sworn nor certified, he found it fell outside the Clause, unlike the formally certified reports at issue in Melendez-Diaz and Bullcoming.8Justia US Supreme Court Center. Williams v. Illinois, Case PDF
The Dissent
Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Scalia, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor, argued that the plurality’s ruling “thwart[s] the Confrontation Clause’s promise to prevent the trial-by-affidavit that the Sixth Amendment was designed to avoid.” The “not for its truth” label, she wrote, was a fiction: Lambatos’s match testimony was meaningful only if Cellmark’s profile was accurate, so the report necessarily came in for its truth. She warned the decision opened a “giant loophole,” letting prosecutors introduce any forensic report by having a second expert repeat its findings while the actual analyst stayed home. She also disputed the plurality’s timing point, noting that police had waited nine months to send the swabs to Cellmark, and dismissed Justice Thomas’s solemnity test as “divorced from the Clause’s text and history.”1Justia US Supreme Court Center. Williams v. Illinois, 567 U.S. 50
A crucial point often missed: five justices, Thomas plus the four dissenters, rejected the plurality’s “not for the truth” reasoning. It commanded only four votes.
Why Lower Courts Couldn’t Apply the Decision
Under Marks v. United States, the binding rule from a fractured decision is the “narrowest grounds” supporting the judgment. In Williams, that pointed to Justice Thomas’s formality test as the concurrence in the judgment, but Thomas had rejected the plurality’s entire framework, leaving no coherent rule to extract.
The result was open disagreement in the lower courts. The Second Circuit called the decision “intractable.” A New York state court likened interpreting it to reading tea leaves. Two evidence scholars called it “bewildering” and “devilishly difficult.”9NYU Law Review. NYU Law Review, Volume 95 Some courts confined Williams to its facts, others adopted the plurality’s not-for-truth rationale to allow surrogate testimony, and others applied Thomas’s formality test.10UC Law SF (Hastings). Confronting Williams: The Confrontation Clause and Forensic Witnesses in the Post-Williams Era
In 2018, Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Sotomayor, dissented from denial of certiorari in Stuart v. Alabama, a case where Alabama had used a substitute analyst to introduce a blood-alcohol test. Gorsuch wrote that lower courts were owed “more clarity” and pointed out that five justices in Williams had rejected the not-for-truth rationale, making the recurring errors in the state courts “understandable.”11Supreme Court of the United States. Stuart v. Alabama, No. 17-1676 (Dissent From Denial of Certiorari)
What Smith v. Arizona Changed in 2024
The Court finally cleaned up the mess on June 21, 2024. In Smith v. Arizona, a forensic analyst named Elizabeth Rast had performed drug testing but was unavailable for trial, and a second scientist, Greggory Longoni, testified using Rast’s notes as the basis for his expert opinion. Arizona courts upheld the conviction on the Williams plurality’s logic.
A unanimous Supreme Court reversed. Justice Kagan, now writing for the Court, held that “when an expert conveys an absent analyst’s statements in support of the expert’s opinion, and the statements provide that support only if true, then the statements come into evidence for their truth.” The opinion acknowledged that Williams had “sown confusion in courts across the country” and expressly rejected the not-for-truth rationale.12Justia US Supreme Court Center. Smith v. Arizona, 602 U.S. ___ (2024)
The practical effect: a prosecutor can no longer put an absent lab analyst’s findings in front of the factfinder by routing them through a surrogate expert. The separate question of whether particular lab statements are “testimonial” was left for lower courts to work out on remand. As a matter of doctrine, the Williams plurality’s central reasoning no longer controls, though the case retains its historical importance as the immediate source of the confusion Smith resolved.
Where Sandy Williams Stands
Williams’s conviction was never disturbed. He filed a pro se motion in November 2014 seeking additional forensic DNA testing under Illinois law. The circuit court dismissed it in September 2022, and the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed on May 2, 2024, finding he had not shown the requested testing was unavailable at trial or that it could produce evidence materially relevant to a claim of actual innocence.4Illinois Appellate Court. People v. Williams, 2024 IL App (1st) 221552-U He remains incarcerated under his life sentence.