Court Opinion

ID: 9433561
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:40:38.023202+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:42.655012
License: Public Domain

Justice Scalia,
concurring.
I agree that there is no “reasonable likelihood that the jurors in petitioner’s case understood the challenged instructions to preclude consideration of relevant mitigating evidence,” Boyde v. California, 494 U. S. 370, 386 (1990), so I join the opinion of the Court. I continue to adhere to my view that the Eighth Amendment does not, in any event, require that sentencing juries be given discretion to consider mitigating evidence. Petitioner’s argument “that the jury at the selection phase must both have discretion to make an individualized determination and have that discretion limited and channeled,” ante, at 275, perfectly describes the incompatibility between the Lockett-Eddings requirement and the holding of Furman v. Georgia, 408 U. S. 238 (1972) (per curiam), that the sentencer’s discretion must be constrained to avoid arbitrary or freakish imposition of the death penalty. See Walton v. Arizona, 497 U. S. 639, 656 (1990) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). The Court’s ongoing attempt to resolve that contradiction by drawing an arbitrary line in the sand between the “eligibility and selection phases” of the sentencing decision is, in my view, incoherent and ultimately doomed to failure.