| Court: | US Supreme Court |
| Facts: | Agurs and he victim spend some time in a hotel room. There's an altercation, and she winds up stabbing him to death with his own knife. Turns out he had a history of knife violence, but this didn't come up at trial. |
| Posture: | Convicted, reversed on appeal, now appealed from the reversal. |
| Issue: | Did the failure to provide background information about the victim deprive Agurs of a fair trial? |
| Holding: | No. The court of appeals is reversed. |
| Rule: | If the omission doesn't affect the fairness of the trial, it's not significant. |
| Reasoning: | Just asking the prosecutor for "anything exculpatory" isn't specific enough to give useful direction. If a request isn't specific or relevant, the prosecutor needs to decide what to turn over. The mere possibility that an undisclosed piece of evidence might have affected the outcome is not enough to warrant reversal. Here, we had testimony that the victim was the initial agressor, and that he brought a knife to the hotel room. Supplementary data about his history wouldn't have added much. |
| Dicta: | Dissent: the court defines "material" so narrowly as to deprive it of meaning. |