432
Opinion of the Court
King dissented, writing that "[f]or the first time in my fourteen years on this court . . . I have serious reservations about whether the State has sentenced to death the right man." 5 F. 3d, at 820.
III
The prosecution's affirmative duty to disclose evidence favorable to a defendant can trace its origins to early 20th-century strictures against misrepresentation and is of course most prominently associated with this Court's decision in Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83 (1963). See id., at 86 (relying on Mooney v. Holohan, 294 U. S. 103, 112 (1935), and Pyle v. Kansas, 317 U. S. 213, 215-216 (1942)). Brady held "that the suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused upon request violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution." 373 U. S., at 87; see Moore v. Illinois, 408 U. S. 786, 794-795
detectives she did not have an opportunity to view the assailant's face and could not identify him. Nevertheless, Kersh identified Kyles untruthfully, she says, after being "told by some people . . . [who] I think . . . were district attorneys and police, that the murderer would be the guy seated at the table with the attorney and that that was the one I should identify as the murderer. One of the people there was at the D. A.'s table at the trial. To the best of my knowledge there was only one black man sitting at the counsel table and I pointed him out as the one I had seen shoot the lady." Kersh claims to have agreed to the State's wishes only after the police and district attorneys assured her that "all the other evidence pointed to [Kyles] as the killer." Affidavit of Darlene Kersh 5, 7.
The District Court denied the motion as an abuse of the writ, although its order was vacated by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit with instructions to deny the motion on the ground that a petitioner may not use a Rule 60(b) motion to raise constitutional claims not included in the original habeas petition. That ruling is not before us. After denial of his Rule 60(b) motion, Kyles again sought state collateral review on the basis of Kersh's affidavit. The Supreme Court of Louisiana granted discretionary review and ordered the trial court to conduct an evidentiary hearing; all state proceedings are currently stayed pending our review of Kyles's federal habeas petition.
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