Cone v. Bell

Cone v. Bell
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 9, 2008 Decided April 28, 2009
Full case name	Cone v. Bell, Warden
Docket no.	07–1114
Citations	556 U.S. 449 (more) 129 S. Ct. 1769; 173 L. Ed. 2d 701
Case history
Prior	492 F.3d 743 (6th Cir. 2007); cert. granted, 554 U.S. 916 (2008). See Bell v. Cone, 535 U.S. 685 (2002) for additional prior history.
Holding
Opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit vacated and remanded to United States District Court to determine whether the prosecution's failure to disclose exculpatory evidence violated Cone's right to due process
Court membership
Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices John P. Stevens · Antonin Scalia Anthony Kennedy · David Souter Clarence Thomas · Ruth Bader Ginsburg Stephen Breyer · Samuel Alito
Case opinions
Majority	Stevens, joined by Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer
Concurrence	Roberts (in judgment)
Concur/dissent	Alito
Dissent	Thomas, joined by Scalia
Laws applied
U. S. Const. amend. XIV

Cone v. Bell, 556 U.S. 449 (2009), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that a defendant was entitled to a hearing to determine whether prosecutors in his 1982 death penalty trial violated his right to due process by withholding exculpatory evidence.^[1] The defendant, Gary Cone, filed a petition for postconviction relief from a 1982 death sentence in which he argued that prosecutors violated his rights to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment by withholding police reports and witness statements that potentially could have shown that his drug addiction affected his behavior.^[2] In an opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court held that Cone was entitled to a hearing to determine whether the prosecution's failure to disclose exculpatory evidence violated Cone's right to due process; the Court noted that "the quantity and the quality of the suppressed evidence lends support to Cone’s position at trial that he habitually used excessive amounts of drugs, that his addiction affected his behavior during his crime spree".^[3] In 2016, Gary Cone died from natural causes while still sitting on Tennessee's death row.^[4]