488
Thomas, J., concurring
we are not now confronted with a mandatory sentencing provision, and I have no occasion here to flesh out my disagreement with the Court's prohibition of such schemes.
The significant point for present purposes is that Woodson and Sumner's invalidation of the mandatory death penalty guaranteed that sentencers would exercise some degree of discretion in every capital case. And under our precedents, in turn, any such exercise of discretion is unavoidably bound up with the two requirements of Furman, as identified in Gregg: first and foremost, that the sentencing authority be "provided with standards to guide its use of the information" developed at sentencing, and second, in support of this principle, that the sentencer be "apprised of the information relevant to the imposition of sentence." Gregg, 428 U. S., at 195. By discovering these two requirements in the Constitution, and by ensuring in Woodson and its progeny that they would always be in play, the Court has put itself in the seemingly permanent business of supervising capital sentencing procedures. While the better view is that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause was intended to place only substantive limitations on punishments, not procedural requirements on sentencing, see Hudson v. McMillian, 503 U. S. 1, 18-20 (1992) (Thomas, J., dissenting); Gardner v. Florida, 430 U. S. 349, 371 (1977) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting), stare decisis requires that we make efforts to adhere to the Court's Eighth Amendment precedents, see Walton v.
North Carolina's and Louisiana's statutes, the process of imposing the penalty on these petitioners was infected at key junctures with the potential for selective and discriminatory discretion, most importantly the possibility that sentencing juries in cases involving sympathetic defendants would acquit or convict on lesser charges. See Brief for Petitioners in Woodson v. North Carolina, O. T. 1975, No. 75-5491, pp. 22-39; Brief for Petitioner in Roberts v. Louisiana, O. T. 1975, No. 75-5844, pp. 30-65. The unsuccessful petitioners in Gregg, Proffitt, and Jurek were white. See Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae in Gregg v. Georgia, O. T. 1975, No. 74-6257, p. 68.
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