Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419, 43 (1995)

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Cite as: 514 U. S. 419 (1995)

Scalia, J., dissenting

supra, at 112-113. The Court's opinion fails almost entirely to take this principle into account. Having spent many pages assessing the effect of the Brady material on two prosecution witnesses and a few items of prosecution evidence, ante, at 441-451, it dismisses the remainder of the evidence against Kyles in a quick page-and-a-half, ante, at 451-453. This partiality is confirmed in the Court's attempt to "recap . . . the suppressed evidence and its significance for the prosecution," ante, at 453 (emphasis added), which omits the required comparison between that evidence and the evidence that was disclosed. My discussion of the record will present the half of the analysis that the Court omits, emphasizing the evidence concededly unaffected by the Brady violation which demonstrates the immateriality of the violation.

In any analysis of this case, the desperate implausibility of the theory that petitioner put before the jury must be kept firmly in mind. The first half of that theory—designed to neutralize the physical evidence (Mrs. Dye's purse in his garbage, the murder weapon behind his stove)—was that petitioner was the victim of a "frame-up" by the police informer and evil genius, Beanie. Now it is not unusual for a guilty person who knows that he is suspected of a crime to try to shift blame to someone else; and it is less common, but not unheard of, for a guilty person who is neither suspected nor subject to suspicion (because he has established a perfect alibi), to call attention to himself by coming forward to point the finger at an innocent person. But petitioner's theory is that the guilty Beanie, who could plausibly be accused of the crime (as petitioner's brief amply demonstrates), but who was not a suspect any more than Kyles was (the police as yet had no leads, see ante, at 424), injected both Kyles and himself into the investigation in order to get the innocent Kyles convicted.1 If this were not stupid enough, the

1 The Court tries to explain all this by saying that Beanie mistakenly thought that he had become a suspect. The only support it provides for this is the fact that, after having come forward with the admission that

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