Matthew J. Ruff Criminal Law Blog on Lawyers.com

The suprising answer to this frequently asked question is yes.  California law allows both direct and circumstantial evidence to be uses to convict someone of a crime in California.  However, there is one very critical difference between the two types of evidence.  With regard to the sufficiency of circumstantial, if the facts allow two reasonable interpretations of the evidence and one points to innocence, the jury must find the defendant not guilty.  What this means is that if the evidence is capable of being construed with two possible rational conclusions, the law favors giving the defendant in a criminal case the benefit of the doubt.  There is an exception if the other interpretation is unreasonable or ridiculous then the Court must reject it, but as long as both conclusions are reasonable, even if one is more reasonable than the other, the law mandates that the accused in a criminal case be found not guilty.  This law can be found in both the old CALJIC jury instructions and the new CALCRIM jury instructions.