Cite as: 505 U. S. 333 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
The Court of Appeals standard therefore hones in on the objective factors or conditions that must be shown to exist before a defendant is eligible to have the death penalty imposed. The Eleventh Circuit has adopted a similar "eligibility" test for determining actual innocence. Johnson v. Singletary, 938 F. 2d 1166 (1991), cert. pending, No. 91-6576.15
We agree with the Courts of Appeals for the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits that the "actual innocence" requirement must focus on those elements that render a defendant eligible for the death penalty, and not on additional mitigating evidence that was prevented from being introduced as a result of a claimed constitutional error.
In the present petition, Sawyer advances two claims, arising from two distinct groups of evidentiary facts that were not considered by the jury that convicted and sentenced Sawyer. The first group of evidence relates to petitioner's role in the offense and consists of affidavits attacking the credibility of Cynthia Shano and an affidavit claiming that one of Shano's sons told a police officer that Sawyer was not responsible for pouring lighter fluid on Arwood and lighting it, and that in fact Sawyer tried to prevent Charles Lane from lighting Arwood on fire. Sawyer claims that the police failed to produce this exculpatory evidence in violation of his due process rights under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83 (1963). The second group consists of medical records from Sawyer's stays as a teenager in two different mental health
15 The Eleventh Circuit articulated the following test: "Thus, a petitioner may make a colorable showing that he is actually innocent of the death penalty by presenting evidence that an alleged constitutional error implicates all of the aggravating factors found to be present by the sentencing body. That is, but for the alleged constitutional error, the sentencing body could not have found any aggravating factors and thus the petitioner was ineligible for the death penalty. In other words, the petitioner must show that absent the alleged constitutional error, the jury would have lacked the discretion to impose the death penalty; that is, that he is ineligible for the death penalty." Johnson v. Singletary, 938 F. 2d, at 1183 (emphasis in original).
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