Whether the state court's refusal to provide a hearing mandated by Georgia's DNA statute denied due process

QUESTIONS PRESENTED FOR REVIEW THIS IS A CAPITAL CASE—EXECUTION IS SCHEDULED FOR TODAY Petitioner Marion Wilson has consistently maintained that he was present when his codefendant Robert Butts killed Donovan Parks with a single shotgun blast to the head and that he knew in advance that Butts was armed and intended to rob someone. But Petitioner has always denied having any knowledge that Butts intended to commit a murder, and has also always denied having any involvement in the planning and commission of the crime. When Petitioner and Butts were separately tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the murder, the science of DNA testing did not allow forensic evaluation of a critical piece of evidence, the victim’s necktie, which the prosecutor used to spin a tale of Petitioner’s active participation in the crime. At the guilt phase, the prosecutor argued that Petitioner had pulled the victim out of his car by the necktie and forced him to the ground just before he was killed. At sentencing, the prosecutor went further, arguing that after grabbing the victim’s tie, Petitioner personally fired the shot that killed him. If the prosecutor’s claim that someone grabbed the victim by the necktie is true, the tie likely still has that person’s epithelial cells on its surface. Touch DNA testing, however, was unavailable until more than a decade after Petitioner’s trial and after postconviction evidence development had ended. Nonetheless, when Petitioner moved under Georgia’s DNA-testing statute to test the tie for DNA, the trial court denied the motion without first providing Petitioner the statutorily required hearing or even giving him a chance to respond to the State’s arguments. The Supreme Court of Georgia, in turn (over the dissent of a single justice), denied Petitioner’s Application for Leave to Appeal without comment, presumptively endorsing the reasoning of the trial court. These rulings give rise to the following important questions: i 1. Was Petitioner denied due process by the state court’s refusal to provide a hearing that was mandated by Georgia’s DNA statute, particularly given Petitioner’s overriding interest in avoiding being executed on the basis of false evidence, the increased likelihood of an erroneous ruling in the absence of such a hearing, and the State’s minimal interest in expediency—an interest that should give way to the far greater societal interest in preventing a miscarriage of justice? 2. In considering the potential impact of favorable DNA results, did the Georgia court violate Petitioner’s rights under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments by limiting its consideration of the evidence to the trial evidence viewed in the light most favorable to the prosecution, instead of considering all the evidence developed in the case that bears on Petitioner’s culpability? 3. Ina capital case, does a state violate the Eighth Amendment by limiting DNA testing to cases in which the evidence would potentially acquit the defendant, even where it is reasonably probable that favorable DNA results would have resulted in a sentence less than death? 4. Does Georgia’s DNA statute violate Equal Protection, Due Process, and the Eighth Amendment by targeting death-sentenced inmates and limiting their access to DNA on the basis of when the extraordinary motion for new trial was filed? ii