Whether the state has a duty to provide a defendant access to admitted exculpatory evidence

QUESTION PRESENTED Less than three weeks before Petitioner Murray Hooper’s scheduled execution date, an attorney with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office revealed for the first-time to the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency, that the sole eyewitness to the crime had excluded Petitioner as a perpetrator when she was unable to identify him in a pre-trial photo lineup. This exculpatory evidence flatly contradicts and puts the lie to the state’s pretrial and trial witnesses who falsely testified that no such lineup had ever been administered. The prosecution’s failure to disclose this evidence is a clear violation of Brady v. Maryland and Napue v. Illinois. Once Petitioner accused the State of withholding the exculpatory evidence, the State dissembled and claimed its disclosure of the lineup was mistaken— averring the contents of its file proved the mistake. When Petitioner’s counsel asked to review the file, allegedly proving the mistake, the State refused. At an evidentiary hearing on Petitioner’s newly discovered Brady/Napue claim, the attorney representing the State avowed that he was “absolutely confident that there was no such photo lineup” while at the same time he admitted that he was not sure if he had “all of those documents” in his own file. At that same hearing, the State’s attorney also agreed that Petitioner’s claim will “rise or fall” on the existence of the photo lineup and agreed that if the evidence exists, it “certainly would be enough to .. . dive right back into everything.” The Arizona postconviction court had evidence before it that showed the State’s unequivocal admissions as to the existence of the exculpatory evidence, but it @) denied Petitioner relief in reliance on a self-serving and admittedly uninformed avowal by the State’s attorney as to the purported contents of the State’s files, while denying Petitioner access to the same files. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed. Accordingly, in defiance of this Court’s clearly established precedents on disclosure of exculpatory evidence, the state courts denied the claim, by suppressing the very evidence required to prove the claim. This case presents the following question: Once the state has admitted that material exculpatory evidence exists, does it have a duty to provide a defendant access to that evidence?