Cite as: 514 U. S. 419 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
The inconclusiveness of the physical evidence does not, to be sure, prove Kyles's innocence, and the jury might have found the eyewitness testimony of Territo and Kersh sufficient to convict, even though less damning to Kyles than that of Smallwood and Williams.22 But the question is not whether the State would have had a case to go to the jury if it had disclosed the favorable evidence, but whether we can be confident that the jury's verdict would have been the same. Confidence that it would have been cannot survive a recap of the suppressed evidence and its significance for the prosecution. The jury would have been entitled to find
(a) that the investigation was limited by the police's un-critical readiness to accept the story and suggestions of an informant whose accounts were inconsistent to the point, for example, of including four different versions of the discovery of the victim's purse, and whose own behavior was enough to raise suspicions of guilt; (b) that the lead police detective who testified was either less than wholly candid or less than fully informed; (c) that the informant's behavior raised suspicions that he had planted both the murder weapon and the victim's purse in the places they were found; (d) that one of the four eyewitnesses crucial to the State's case had given a description that did not match the defendant and better described the informant; (e) that another eyewitness had been coached, since he had first stated that he had not seen the killer outside the getaway car, or the killing itself, whereas at trial he
would have been longer), but that she had indeed made her typical weekly purchases of pet food (hence the presence of the pet food in Kyles's apartment, which the State claimed were Dye's). Tr. of Oral Arg. 53-54.
22 See supra, at 445. On remand, of course, the State's case will be weaker still, since the prosecution is unlikely to rely on Kersh, who now swears that she committed perjury at the two trials when she identified Kyles as the murderer. See n. 6, supra.
453
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