Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/558bv.pdf
Page Number: 300.0

OCTOBER  TERM,  2009 

139 

Syllabus 

SMITH,  WARDEN  v.  SPISAK 

certiorari to the united states court of appeals for 
the sixth circuit 

No. 08–724.  Argued October 13, 2009—Decided January 12, 2010 

After  the  Ohio  courts  sentenced  respondent  Spisak  to  death  and  denied 
his  claims  on  direct  appeal  and  collateral  review,  he  ﬁled  a  federal  ha­
beas  petition  claiming  that,  at  his  trial’s  penalty  phase,  (1)  the  instruc­
tions and verdict forms unconstitutionally required the jury to consider 
in  mitigation  only  those  factors  that  it  unanimously  found  to  be  miti­
gating, see Mills v.  Maryland, 486 U. S. 367, and (2) his counsel’s inade­
quate closing  argument deprived  him of  effective assistance of  counsel, 
see Strickland v.  Washington, 466 U. S. 668.  The District Court denied 
the  petition,  but  the  Sixth  Circuit  accepted  both  arguments  and  or­
dered relief. 

Held: 

1.  Because the state court’s upholding of the mitigation jury instruc­
tions and forms was not “contrary to, or . . . an  unreasonable application 
of,  clearly  established  Federal  law,  as  determined  by  [this]  Court,”  28 
U. S. C.  § 2254(d)(1),  the  Sixth  Circuit  was  barred  from  reaching  a  con­
trary decision.  The Court of Appeals erred in holding that the instruc­
tions  and  forms  contravened  Mills,  in  which  this  Court  held  that  the 
jury  instructions  and  verdict  forms  at  issue  violated  the  Constitution 
because, read naturally, they told the jury that it could not ﬁnd a partic­
ular  circumstance  to  be  mitigating  unless  all  12  jurors  agreed  that  the 
mitigating circumstance had been proved to exist, 486 U. S., at 380–381, 
384.  Even assuming that Mills sets forth the pertinent “clearly estab­
lished  Federal  law”  for  reviewing  the  state-court  decision  in  this  case, 
the  instructions  and  forms  used  here  differ  signiﬁcantly  from  those  in 
Mills:  They  made  clear  that,  to  recommend  a  death  sentence,  the  jury 
had to ﬁnd unanimously that each of the aggravating factors outweighed 
any mitigating circumstances, but they did not say that the jury had to 
determine  the  existence  of  each  individual  mitigating  factor  unani­
mously.  Nor  did  they  say  anything  about  how—or  even  whether—the 
jury should make individual determinations that each particular mitigat­
ing circumstance existed.  They focused only on the overall question of 
balancing  the  aggravating  and  mitigating  factors,  and  they  repeatedly 
told  the  jury  to  consider  all  relevant  evidence.  Thus,  the  instructions 
and verdict forms did not clearly bring about, either through what they 
said or what they implied, the constitutional error in the Mills instruc­
tions.  Pp. 143–149.