May the presentation of false evidence in a capital case be excused for want of diligence, when the evidence was challenged only after the State's expert admitted that his trial testimony was dubious?

QUESTION PRESENTED In pursuit of a capital conviction and death sentence in this case, the prosecutor relied on an inflammatory impossibility. At Gregory Hunt’s trial in 1990, the prosecutor insisted that a stick had been inserted into the victim’s vagina, obtaining her cervical mucus on it. See, e.g., Tr. R. 861 (“She is laying there, God, she is beat to a pulp and he takes this broom stick and I suggest to you that evidence is none other than that he put it four inches deep in her vagina, to her cervix and the mucus secreted by the cervix is on it.”). However, the State’s expert witness now admits that the victim’s cervical mucus could not have been on the stick, as her cervix had been previously removed. This Court has established that the presentation of false evidence violates a defendant’s constitutional right to due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. See Napue v. Illinois, 360 U.S. 264, 269 (1959); Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972). Although the jury was misled in this case, and in such a disturbing fashion, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals denied Mr. Hunt’s claim. The court reasoned that Mr. Hunt should have challenged the falsity of this evidence at an earlier time, prior to the pathologist’s admission in 2016 that his trial testimony was dubious. This ruling — that Mr. Hunt was obligated to discover the falsity of the State’s evidence at an earlier time — is contrary to this Court’s precedents. See Strickler v. Greene, 527 U.S. 263, 286 (1999) (explaining that defendants have no “procedural i obligation to assert constitutional error on the basis of mere suspicion that some prosecutorial misstep may have occurred”); see also Banks v. Dretke, 540 U.S. 668, 696 (2004) (“A rule thus declaring ‘prosecutor may hide, defendant must seek,’ is not tenable in a system constitutionally bound to accord defendants due process.”). Mr. Hunt’s case thus presents the following question to this Court: May the presentation of false evidence in a capital case be excused for want of diligence, when the evidence was challenged only after the State’s expert admitted that his trial testimony was dubious? ii