Cite as: 514 U. S. 419 (1995)
Scalia, J., dissenting
without considering the infinitesimal probability of the jury's swallowing the entire concoction of implausibility squared.
This basic error of approaching the evidence piecemeal is also what accounts for the Court's obsessive focus on the credibility or culpability of Beanie, who did not even testify at trial and whose credibility or innocence the State has never once avowed. The Court's opinion reads as if either petitioner or Beanie must be telling the truth, and any evidence tending to inculpate or undermine the credibility of the one would exculpate or enhance the credibility of the other. But the jury verdict in this case said only that petitioner was guilty of the murder. That is perfectly consistent with the possibilities that Beanie repeatedly lied, ante, at 445, that he was an accessory after the fact, cf. ante, at 445-446, or even that he planted evidence against petitioner, ante, at 448. Even if the undisclosed evidence would have allowed the defense to thoroughly impeach Beanie and to suggest the above possibilities, the jury could well have believed all of those things and yet have condemned petitioner because it could not believe that all four of the eyewitnesses were similarly mistaken.2
Of course even that much rests on the premise that competent counsel would run the terrible risk of calling Beanie, a witness whose "testimony almost certainly would have inculpated [petitioner]" and whom "any reasonable attorney would perceive . . . as a 'loose cannon.' " 5 F. 3d, at 818. Perhaps because that premise seems so implausible, the Court retreats to the possibility that petitioner's counsel,
2 There is no basis in anything I have said for the Court's charge that "the dissent appears to assume that Kyles must lose because there would still have been adequate [i. e., sufficient] evidence to convict even if the favorable evidence had been disclosed." Ante, at 435, n. 8. I do assume, indeed I expressly argue, that petitioner must lose because there was, is, and will be overwhelming evidence to convict, so much evidence that disclosure would not "have made a different result reasonably probable." Ante, at 441.
463
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