564
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
Perhaps the Court has been misdirected by the wording of Article 38.07, which speaks in both its old and new versions of evidence upon which a "conviction . . . is supportable." See ante, at 547. That sounds like a "sufficiency of the evidence rule," until one realizes that any evidence admissible in a criminal case—i. e., any evidence that a jury is entitled to consider in determining whether the prosecution has met its burden of persuasion—is at least potentially evidence upon which a "conviction . . . is supportable." Conversely, as I have just said, evidence to which the jury may give no weight in making that determination is effectively inadmissible.8
In short, no matter how it is phrased, the corroboration requirement of Article 38.07 is functionally identical to a conditional rule of witness competency. If the former version of Article 38.07 had provided instead that "the testimony of the victim shall be inadmissible to prove the defendant's guilt unless corroborated," it would produce the
8 It is thus no wonder that before 1986 the general rule of witness competency was codified at Article 38.06 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, and the statute now at issue immediately followed it. Article 38.07 was an exception to the general rule laid out in Article 38.06. It is logical to put an exception right after the rule. Yet the Court draws the opposite inference from that juxtaposition. See ante, at 545, n. 32.
The Court's related observation that Texas' general witness competency statute "already contains its own provision respecting child witnesses," ante, at 544-545, is true but irrelevant. Article 38.07's corroboration requirement has nothing to do with the diminished credibility of child witnesses. Indeed, the statute has always permitted juries to credit fully the testimony of sexual offense victims below a certain age (first 14, then 18) without any corroboration, the reason apparently being that the legislature considers victims under a certain age to be too young to consent to sex and then lie about it. See, e. g., Scoggan v. State, 799 S. W. 2d 679, 681 (Tex. Crim. App. 1990); Hernandez v. State, 651 S. W. 2d 746, 752-753 (Tex. Crim. App. 1983) (concurring opinion adopted on rehearing). The corroboration requirement attaches only to victims above a certain age, and thus would not be appropriate for inclusion in a "provision respecting child witnesses."
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