Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/217

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Cite as: 502 U. S. 46 (1991)

59

Opinion of the Court

required to be set aside. See Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U. S. 307, 319 (1979). Insufficiency of proof, in other words, is legal error. This represents a purely semantical dispute. In one sense “legal error” includes inadequacy of evidence— namely, when the phrase is used as a term of art to designate those mistakes that it is the business of judges (in jury cases) and of appellate courts to identify and correct. In this sense “legal error” occurs when a jury, properly instructed as to the law, convicts on the basis of evidence that no reasonable person could regard as sufficient. But in another sense—a more natural and less artful sense—the term “legal error” means a mistake about the law, as opposed to a mistake concerning the weight or the factual import of the evidence. The answer to petitioner’s objection is simply that we are using “legal error” in the latter sense. That surely establishes a clear line that will separate Turner from Yates, and it happens to be a line that makes good sense. Jurors are not generally equipped to determine whether a particular theory of conviction submitted to them is contrary to law—whether, for example, the action in question is protected by the Constitution, is time barred, or fails to come within the statutory definition of the crime. When, therefore, jurors have been left the option of relying upon a legally inadequate theory, there is no reason to think that their own intelligence and expertise will save them from that error. Quite the opposite is true, however, when they have been left the option of relying upon a factually inadequate theory, since jurors are well equipped to analyze the evidence, see Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145, 157 (1968). As the Seventh Circuit has put it: “It is one thing to negate a verdict that, while supported by evidence, may have been based on an erroneous view of the law; it is another to do so merely on the chance— remote, it seems to us—that the jury convicted on a ground that was not supported by adequate evidence when there existed alternative grounds for which the