Cite as: 506 U. S. 357 (1993)
Per Curiam
price"). In this case, the Court of Appeals offered no justification for its decision to exclude the transcript from consideration. There can be no doubt as to the transcript's relevance, for it calls into serious question the factual predicate on which the District Court and Court of Appeals relied in deciding petitioner's ineffective-assistance claim. As the Court of Appeals itself acknowledged, its refusal to review the transcript left it unable to apply the manifest injustice exception to the law of the case doctrine, and hence unable to determine whether its prior decision should be reconsidered.*
On the facts of this case, exclusion of the transcript cannot be justified by the delay in its discovery. That delay resulted substantially from the State's own erroneous assertions that closing arguments had not been transcribed. As the District Court found: "[T]he entire transcript should have been made available for Dobbs' direct appeal, and the State represented to this Court that the sentencing phase closing arguments could not be transcribed. Dobbs' position that he legitimately relied on the State's representation is well taken." Civ. Action No. 80-247 (ND Ga., Mar. 6, 1990), p. 4.
We hold that, under the particular circumstances described above, the Court of Appeals erred by refusing to consider the sentencing hearing transcript. The judgment
*The concurrence suggests, post, at 360-363, that the error in this case, limited in scope to closing arguments at the penalty phase, is likely insignificant. In fact, an inadequate or harmful closing argument, when combined, as here, with a failure to present mitigating evidence, may be highly relevant to the ineffective-assistance determination under Eleventh Circuit law. See King v. Strickland, 714 F. 2d 1481, 1491 (CA11 1983), vacated on other grounds, 467 U. S. 1211, adhered to on remand, 748 F. 2d 1462, 1463-1464 (CA11 1984), cert. denied, 471 U. S. 1016 (1985); Mathis v. Zant, 704 F. Supp. 1062, 1064 (ND Ga. 1989). In any event, we see no reason to depart here from our normal practice of allowing courts more familiar with a case to conduct their own harmless-error analyses.
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