Kevin Edward Connors v. Texas

Petitioner sought state habeas corpus relief from his murder conviction based on prosecutorial misconduct in violation of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963). The state trial court conducted an evidentiary hearing with live testimony, made fact findings and legal conclusions, and recommended a new trial or sentencing hearing. Yet, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) rejected the trial court’s fact findings in toto even though many turned on assessments of witness credibility and demeanor and others were uncontroverted. The TCCA substituted its own implicit fact findings based on a cold record and denied relief in a perfunctory order. This Court has cautioned that a superior court’s rejection of an inferior court’s favorable dispositive fact findings based on witness credibility and substitution of its own unfavorable findings based on a cold record would “give rise to serious [constitutional] questions.” United States v. Raddatz, 447 U.S. 667, 681 n.7 (1980). The questions presented are: I. Whether it violates due process for a superior court to substitute its own unfavorable fact findings based on a cold record for an inferior court’s favorable dispositive fact findings that were based on witness credibility and demeanor. II. Whether the TCCA’s one-sentence, summary materiality analysis misapplied this Court’s Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence in view of the evidence that six