Cite as: 505 U. S. 333 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
make petitioner eligible for the death penalty.17 Therefore, as to this evidence, petitioner has not shown that there would be a fundamental miscarriage of justice for the Court to fail to reexamine the merits of this successive claim.
We are convinced that the evidence allegedly kept from the jury due to an alleged Brady violation also fails to show that the petitioner is actually innocent of the death penalty to which he has been sentenced. Much of the evidence goes to the credibility of Shano, suggesting, e. g., that contrary to her testimony at trial she knew Charles Lane prior to the day of the murder; that she was drinking the day before the murder; and that she testified under a grant of immunity from the prosecutor. 2 App. 589-608. This sort of latter-day evidence brought forward to impeach a prosecution witness will seldom, if ever, make a clear and convincing showing that no reasonable juror would have believed the heart of Shano's account of petitioner's actions.
The final bit of evidence petitioner alleges was unconstitutionally kept from the jury due to a Brady violation was a statement made by Shano's then 4-year-old son, Wayne, to a police officer the day after the murder. Petitioner has submitted an affidavit from one Diane Thibodeaux stating that she was present when Wayne told a police detective who asked who had lit Arwood on fire that "Daddy [Sawyer] tried to help the lady" and that the "other man" had pushed Sawyer back into a chair. 2 App. 587. The affidavit also states that Wayne showed the officer where to find a cigarette lighter and a can of lighter fluid in the trash. Ibid. Because this evidence goes to the jury's finding of aggravated arson, it goes both to petitioner's guilt or innocence of the crime of first-degree murder and the aggravating circumstance of a murder committed in the course of an aggravated arson. However, we conclude that this affidavit, in view of
17 In the same category are the affidavits from petitioner's family members attesting to the deprivation and abuse suffered by petitioner as a child. 2 App. 571-584.
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