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HOPKINS v. REEVES

Opinion of the Court

ﬁcial barrier to the provision of instructions on offenses that
actually are lesser included offenses under state law.

The Court of Appeals justiﬁed its holding principally on
the ground that respondent had been placed in the same posi-
tion as the defendant in Beck––that there had been a distor-
tion of the factﬁnding process because his jury had been
“ ‘forced into an all-or-nothing choice between capital murder
102 F. 3d, at 982 (quoting Spaziano v.
and innocence.’ ”
In so doing, the Court
Florida, 468 U. S. 447, 455 (1984)).
of Appeals again overlooked signiﬁcant distinctions between
this case and Beck.
In Beck, the death penalty was auto-
matically tied to conviction, and Beck’s jury was told that if
it convicted the defendant of the charged offense, it was re-
quired to impose the death penalty. See Beck v. Alabama,
447 U. S., at 639, n. 15. This threatened to make the issue
at trial whether the defendant should be executed or not,
rather than “whether the State ha[d] proved each and every
element of the capital crime beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Id., at 643, n. 19.
In addition, the distortion of the trial proc-
ess carried over directly to sentencing, because an Alabama
jury unwilling to acquit had no choice but to impose the
death penalty. There was thus a signiﬁcant possibility that
the death penalty would be imposed upon defendants whose
conduct did not merit it, simply because their juries might
be convinced that they had committed some serious crime
and should not escape punishment entirely.

These factors are not present here. Respondent’s jury did
Indeed, with
not have the burden of imposing a sentence.
respect to respondent’s insanity defense, it was speciﬁcally
instructed that it had “no right to take into consideration
what punishment or disposition he may or may not receive
in the event of his conviction or . . . acquittal by reason of
insanity.” App. 24.
In addition, the three-judge panel that
imposed the death penalty did not have to consider the di-
lemma faced by Beck’s jury; its alternative to death was not