446
Opinion of the Court
lice, he said he bought the LTD on Thursday, and in his conversation with the prosecutor between trials it was again on Thursday that he said he helped Kyles retrieve Kyles's car. Although none of the first three versions of this story mentioned Kevin Black as taking part in the retrieval of the car and transfer of groceries, after Black implicated Beanie by his testimony for the defense at the first trial, Beanie changed his story to include Black as a participant. In Beanie's several accounts, Dye's purse first shows up variously next to a building, in some bushes, in Kyles's car, and at Black's house.
Even if Kyles's lawyer had followed the more conservative course of leaving Beanie off the stand, though, the defense could have examined the police to good effect on their knowledge of Beanie's statements and so have attacked the reliability of the investigation in failing even to consider Beanie's possible guilt and in tolerating (if not countenancing) serious possibilities that incriminating evidence had been planted. See, e. g., Bowen v. Maynard, 799 F. 2d 593, 613 (CA10 1986) ("A common trial tactic of defense lawyers is to discredit the caliber of the investigation or the decision to charge the defendant, and we may consider such use in assessing a possible Brady violation"); Lindsey v. King, 769 F. 2d 1034, 1042 (CA5 1985) (awarding new trial of prisoner convicted in Louisiana state court because withheld Brady evidence "carried within it the potential . . . for the . . . discrediting . . . of the police methods employed in assembling the case").15
15 The dissent, post, at 464, suggests that for jurors to count the sloppiness of the investigation against the probative force of the State's evidence would have been irrational, but of course it would have been no such thing. When, for example, the probative force of evidence depends on the circumstances in which it was obtained and those circumstances raise a possibility of fraud, indications of conscientious police work will enhance probative force and slovenly work will diminish it. See discussion of purse and gun, infra, at 447-449.
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