Thurgood Marshall

“ The sad irony of the majority's position is that, under its reasoning, the more fundamentally rooted a legal principle is in our constitutional values, the less scrutiny we would apply to jury instructions that run counter to that principle. ”

“ In a society that values the presumption of innocence and demands resolution of all reasonable doubt before stripping its members of liberty or life, the decision to leave undisturbed a sentence of death that could be constitutionally infirm is intolerable.
Contrary to the majority's intimation that the legal standard is "less than clear from our cases," see ante, at 378, we have firmly adhered to a strict standard in our review of challenged jury instructions. ”

“ The insistence in our law that the sentencer know and consider the defendant as a human being before deciding whether to impose the ultimate sanction operates as a shield against arbitrary execution and enforces our abiding judgment that an offender's circumstances, apart from his crime, are relevant to his appropriate punishment.
The Court holds today that Richard Boyde's death sentence must be affirmed even if his sentencing jury reasonably could have believed that it could not consider mitigating evidence regarding his character and background. ”

“ It is an essential corollary of our reasonable-doubt standard in criminal proceedings that a conviction, capital or otherwise, cannot stand if the jury's verdict could have rested on unconstitutional grounds. ”

“ Jurors, relying on ordinary language and experience, would not view the seriousness of a crime as dependent upon the background or character of the offender. A typical juror would not, for example, describe a particular murder as "a less serious crime" because of the redeeming qualities of the murderer; surely Boyde's murder of Gibson could not be considered less grave, as the majority suggests, because Boyde demonstrated that his "criminal conduct was an aberration from otherwise good character," ante, at 382-383, n. ”

“ In such a circumstance, a capital defendant's interest in an exacting review of the alleged error is unquestionably at its height, because there is no "presumptive validity" regarding the jury's sentence. The State, on the other hand, retains no strong reliance interest in sustaining a capital verdict that may have been obtained based on a misunderstanding of the law.
Our refusal to apply a standard less protective than "reasonable doubt" to alleged errors in criminal trials in part guarantees the reliability of the jury's determination. ”

“ Just as the "reasonable doubt" standard at trial reflects our awareness of the meaning and serious consequences that our society attaches to a criminal conviction, the insistence on reasonable certainty in the correctness of capital sentencing instructions is commensurate with our heightened concern for accuracy in capital proceedings. Thus, the majority's assertion that "there may not be great differences among these various phrasings," ante, at 379, is unfounded. ”

“ To the extent the Court's new standard does require a defendant to make a greater showing than Sandstrom, the malleability of the standard encourages ad hoc review of challenged instructions by lower courts. Although the standard, as the majority adopts it, requires a defendant challenging the constitutionality of an instruction to demonstrate more than a reasonable "possibility" that his jury was "impermissibly inhibited by the instruction," a defendant "need not establish that the jury . ”

“ Channeling sentencing discretion is indeed an essential aspect of a constitutional capital punishment scheme, but it should not be understood to deprive the sentencer of the choice to reject the ultimate sanction where the aggravating circumstances do not warrant it. ”

“ Rather, an offender's background and character unrelated to his crime should be considered by the sentencer because of society's deeply felt view that punishment should reflect both the seriousness of a crime and the nature of the offender. ”

“ The majority defends the adoption of its "reasonable likelihood" standard on the ground that it "better accommodates the concerns of finality and accuracy than does a standard which makes the inquiry dependent on how a single hypothetical 'reasonable' juror could or might have interpreted the instruction." Ante, at 380. The majority fails, however, to explain how the new standard differs from Sandstrom § "could have" standard other than to suggest that the new standard, unlike Sandstrom's, requires more than "speculation" to overturn a capital sentence. ”

“ More fundamentally, the majority offers no persuasive basis for altering our standard of review regarding capital instructions alleged to be constitutionally infirm. Despite the majority's declaration to the contrary, our "strong policy in favor of accurate determination of the appropriate sentence in a capital case" is not equaled by our "strong policy against retrials" based on alleged deficiencies in jury instructions. Ante, at 380. We have long embraced a commitment to resolving doubts about the accuracy of a death verdict in favor of a capital defendant. ”

“ Read in context, the passage suggests only that in a case where an instruction was probably misinterpreted, any doubt must be resolved in favor of the accused; it does not suggest, as the majority implies, that it must be probable that an instruction could be misinterpreted before a conviction will be overturned.↑ That the majority perceives little difference between our longstanding approach to challenged jury instructions and its reformulated "reasonable likelihood" standard suggests an alarming insensitivity to the premises underlying our criminal justice system. ”

“ The characterization of felonies, which are defined by certain offense-related elements, as serious crimes regardless of the nature of the offender captures our intuitive sense that a crime is not made less serious by factors extrinsic to it, but only by circumstances surrounding the offense itself. ”

“ For example, because "the presumption of innocence [is] that bedrock 'axiomatic and elementary' principle whose 'enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law,' " In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 363, 90 S.Ct. ”

“ The government is not responsible for, and hence not able to prevent, attorney errors that will result in reversal of a conviction or sentence. Attorney errors come in an infinite variety and are as likely to be utterly harmless in a particular case as they are to be prejudicial. ”

“ The language in Napue thereafter provided the governing standard for determining whether a prosecutor's knowing use of perjured testimony mandates reversal of a sentence. See United States v. Bagley, 473 U.S. 667, 679, n. 9, 105 S.Ct. 3375, 3382, n. 9, 87 L.Ed.2d 481 (1985) (opinion of BLACKMUN, J.) .
As Justice BLACKMUN explained in Bagley, the "reasonable likelihood" standard should be understood to be an equivalent of the "harmless error" standard adopted in Chapman v. ”