Does the State's intentional presentation of false evidence at a clemency hearing violate due process?

QUESTIONS PRESENTED At Petitioner’s commutation hearing the prosecutor arguing against clemency—Jill Longhurst—told the Idaho Parole Commission that a fifty-year-old murder had been solved, Mr. Creech had been determined guilty based on new evidence, and if he wasn’t executed he would be getting away with it. Those were all lies. The case hadn’t been solved and there was no new evidence. There was only a bogus statement from Mr. Creech to law enforcement that had been fully vetted five decades earlier and rightly rejected as incredible, since it took credit for multiple murders that never happened. At the same hearing, Ms. Longhurst also presented a photograph that purported to show that the murder weapon—a sock filled with batteries—bore Mr. Creech’s name on it. The State now admits that the photograph depicted no such thing and instead reflected two random socks from Mr. Creech’s cell that have no connection whatsoever to the weapon—which the prosecutors have never made available to anyone. The questions presented are: (1) Does the State’s intentional presentation of false evidence at a clemency hearing violate due process? (2) Under what circumstances, if any, does harmless-error analysis apply when constitutional challenges are brought to clemency proceedings? PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI — Page i