The unsigned per curiam opinion, an opinion issued in the name of the Court rather than a named justice, was decided on 1 June 2026 in docket No. 25-580. The Court granted the petition, vacated the judgment of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and remanded the case for further proceedings.
The ruling does not decide whether Gary Richard Whitton is guilty or whether his death sentence will ultimately stand. It tells the Eleventh Circuit to reconsider the habeas issue without weighing DNA evidence that the jury never saw.
Habeas corpus is a procedure allowing a prisoner to challenge the lawfulness of custody after conviction. Whitton, who was convicted in Florida of murder and sentenced to death, argued in federal habeas proceedings that the prosecution violated Giglio v. United States, the 1972 Supreme Court precedent that bars prosecutors from knowingly using false testimony when there is a reasonable likelihood the falsehood affected the verdict.
The disputed trial testimony came from Jake Ozio, a jailhouse informant who testified that he heard Whitton confess while the two were incarcerated. According to the Supreme Court opinion, Ozio also told the jury he had no prior criminal history before his spring-break arrest, but juvenile records in the state's possession showed prior charges including assault with bodily injury, terroristic threats and burglary.
The Eleventh Circuit agreed that Ozio's criminal-history testimony was false and that the state knew it was false, according to the Supreme Court's summary of the lower ruling. The appeals court still affirmed denial of relief after considering whether Ozio's testimony was immaterial in light of other evidence against Whitton.
The Supreme Court said the Eleventh Circuit made the wrong move when it considered post-trial DNA results from blood stains on Whitton's boots. At Whitton's trial, an analyst testified that DNA in the stains matched neither Whitton nor the victim, James Maulden. A later test, conducted years after conviction, found a match with Maulden, but the Supreme Court said that evidence did not exist at trial and therefore could not have influenced the jury's verdict.
Materiality, in this context, means whether there is a reasonable likelihood that the false testimony affected the verdict. The Supreme Court said the lower court should ask that question by looking at the evidence presented to the jury, because evidence outside the trial record "sheds no light" on whether Ozio's testimony influenced that jury.
The Court expressly left two questions open. It said it expressed no view on whether the Florida Supreme Court's assessment of the trial evidence was reasonable, and no view on the state's argument that Whitton failed to exhaust the Giglio claim in state court before bringing it in federal habeas proceedings. Exhaustion means a prisoner normally must first present a claim through available state-court channels before a federal court may grant habeas relief.