Whether the prosecution's suppression of exculpatory DNA evidence and alternative suspect information violated the defendant's due process rights under Brady v. Maryland and deprived him of a fair trial

No question identified. : To the Honorable Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Associate Justice of the United States and Circuit Justice for the Fifth Circuit: 1. Inaccordance with this Court’s Rules 13.5, 22, 30.2 and 30.3, Applicant Steven Elliot Powers respectfully requests that the time to file his petition for a writ of certiorari be extended for 30 days, through October 17, 2025. The Mississippi Supreme Court issued its order on September 11, 2024 (Exhibit A) and denied rehearing on June 19, 2025. (Exhibit B). Absent an extension of time, the petition would be due on September 17, 2025. This Court’s jurisdiction is based on 28 U.S.C. 1257. This request is unopposed. 2. This case presents two important questions of federal constitutional law in the context of capital conviction and sentencing: 1) whether the Mississippi Supreme Court may hold that Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963) claims and Brady-related prosecutorial claims are time and successive-writ barred without reaching the merits of these claims to avoid federal review of a constitutional violation; and 2) whether the State’s suppression of exculpatory evidence and misleading statements to the trial court and the jury deprived Powers of his right to a fair trial in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. 3. Newly-discovered evidence shows that the prosecution suppressed material DNA evidence and evidence of the original, alternative suspect, misled the jury with false and prejudicial statements at trial and failed to correct false testimony at a suppression hearing and later by omission at trial. See Napue v. Illinois, 360 U.S. 264 (1959). Powers could not have raised his Brady and Napue claims earlier as he was unaware of the evidence that the government concealed from him until 2023. 4. Powers was indicted for capital murder with the underlying crime of attempted rape on September 16, 1998. A key piece of evidence in showing Powers was engaged in the crime of attempted rape was a used sanitary napkin and a blood-stained note found in Powers’ possession. The State argued that Powers took the sanitary napkin as a trophy from the victim (who was menstruating) and represented to the jury that the DNA analysis by the State crime lab on the napkin was inconclusive. But the State left out that it had also sent the note and sanitary napkin to ReliaGene, an out-of-state laboratory that excluded the victim as the DNA donor, and determined the blood on the note belonged to a male, not a female. Nor did it provide this information in discovery to the defense. Other than the sanitary napkin and note the only evidence of an attempted rape was a set of color crime scene photographs and the evaluation of those photographs by the State’s now discredited forensic pathologist, Dr. Stephen Hayne. The jury found Powers guilty of attempted rape and convicted him of capital murder. The next day after a separate sentencing hearing in which no mitigation evidence was presented he was sentenced to death. The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed Powers’s conviction and sentence. 5. Powers’ current post-conviction counsel discovered his Brady claims in 2023. On March 9, 2023, the Mississippi Crime Lab provided Powers access to its file and an inventory of biological evidence including a Bioscience Worksheet from ReliaGene Technologies, the out-of-state lab. And in 2023, current post-conviction counsel for Powers received a police incident report naming an alternative suspect, one of the victim’s boyfriends, Ray Jeffus. There was no mention of Jeffus in the police report, or the discovery 3 provided to Powers and his counsel, or at trial -even though the victim was seen speaking to an individual matching his description on the day before her death. Failure by the prosecution to disclose an alternative suspect is material, and must be disclosed, when there is “some plausible nexus linking the other suspect to the crime.” Kiley v. United States, 260 F. Supp. 2d 248, 273 (D. Mass. 2003); see also Crawf