Cope v. South Carolina

Issue: (1) Whether South Carolina violated petitioner’s federal due process right to present his full defense under Washington v. Texas and Chambers v. Mississippi, while replicating its error in Holmes v. South Carolina by arbitrarily applying state evidentiary rules to exclude a wealth of highly relevant and reliable evidence about the true perpetrator’s modus operandi and out-of-court admissions that tended to prove that the perpetrator raped and murdered petitioner’s child by himself, rather than in some sort of improbable collaboration with petitioner; and (2) whether, despite this Court’s unanimous decision in Holmes v. South Carolina, South Carolina erroneously evaluated petitioner’s federal constitutional challenge to the exclusion of defense evidence in light of the prosecution’s evidence and theory of guilt, while failing to consider the actual issues raised by the defense or the purposes of the evidentiary rules at issue.