In an iterative decoding algorithm, such as Chase Type-II decoding algorithm and its improvements, candidate codewords for a received vector are generated for test based on a bounded-distance decoder and a set of test error patterns. It is desirable to remove useless test error patterns in these decoding algorithms. This paper presents a sufficient condition for ruling out some useless test error patterns. If this condition holds for a test error patterns e, then e can not produce a candidate codeword with a correlation metric larger than those of the candidate codewords generated already and hence e is useless. This significantly reduces the decoding operations in Chase type-II decoding algorithm or decoding iterations in its improvements.