United States v. Agurs
Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.
Status
More on how this was screened
Later opinions repeatedly report that treatment while continuing to apply Agurs's unaffected principles, including the prosecution's disclosure duty without a defense request, the irrelevance of prosecutorial good faith, the special standard for knowing use of perjury, and evaluation of suppressed evidence in the context of the whole record. Other nearby adverse language concerned unrelated precedents, appellate issues, or party arguments, and one court expressly rejected a suggestion that Agurs's surviving contextual-materiality principles were no longer good law.
6,529 later cases cite United States v. Agurs; 136 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading; 129 of them have been read, and the text of 7 citing opinions could not be retrieved, so those remain unread. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.
Relying on United States v. Agurs?
This page shows what later courts did to it. Ask about your specific facts and see whether it still carries your argument, with citations you can check.
Treatments
Abrogated
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The Supreme Court abrogated Agurs's separate materiality standards based on whether the defense made no request, a general request, or a specific request, adopting one reasonable-probability standard for all three situations.
United States v. Bagley · Supreme Court of the United States · filed
We find the Strickland formulation of the Agurs test for materiality sufficiently flexible to cover the “no request,” “general request,” and “specific request” cases of prosecu-torial failure to disclose evidence favorable to the accused: The evidence is material only if there is a reasonable probability that, had the evidence been disclosed to the defense, the result of the proceeding would have been different. A “reasonable probability” is a probability sufficient to undermine confidence in the outcome.
Read the full opinion on CourtListener →
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