Amy Howe

Nov 16 2022

Court allows Arizona to execute man who claimed that state withheld evidence

The Supreme Court refused to block the lethal injection of Murray Hooper, a 76-year-old inmate who was scheduled to be executed in Arizona on Wednesday. Hooper had asked the justices to intervene in light of what he characterized as new evidence showing that he was wrongfully convicted, but Arizona prosecutors dismissed his contention as “entirely trumped-up.”

In a pair of brief, unsigned orders, the justices rejected Hooper’s final appeals. There were no recorded dissents.

Hooper was sentenced to death for his role in the murder-for-hire of Pat Redmond and Helen Phelps during a home invasion on New Year’s Eve in 1980. He argued that prosecutors had only revealed to him in the past few weeks – more than 40 years after the crime – that the lone eyewitness had failed to identify him in a photo line-up. The prosecutors’ failure to divulge this evidence sooner, he said, violates his rights under the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brady v. Maryland, holding that prosecutors must disclose any evidence they have that is favorable to the defendant.

The state dismissed Hooper’s contention as “totally baseless.” A letter from prosecutors to the Arizona Board of Clemency indicating that Marilyn Redmond, Pat’s wife and the only eyewitness, had been unable to identify Hooper in a line-up was, the state explained, an “error”; Marilyn Redmond “had never been shown a printed line-up.” The Arizona state court that considered Hooper’s efforts to invalidate his conviction based on this allegation, the state pointed out, concluded that the allegation “has no evidentiary support and no basis in fact.”

This post is also published on SCOTUSblog.

Amy L Howe
Until September 2016, Amy served as the editor and reporter for SCOTUSblog, a blog devoted to coverage of the Supreme Court of the United States; she continues to serve as an independent contractor and reporter for SCOTUSblog. Before turning to full-time blogging, she served as counsel in over two dozen merits cases at the Supreme Court and argued two cases there. From 2004 until 2011, she co-taught Supreme Court litigation at Stanford Law School; from 2005 until 2013, she co-taught a similar class at Harvard Law School. She has also served as an adjunct professor at American University’s Washington College of Law and Vanderbilt Law School. Amy is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a master’s degree in Arab Studies and a law degree from Georgetown University.
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