Cite as: 503 U. S. 222 (1992)
Syllabus
inhuman" was vague and imprecise, inviting arbitrary and capricious application of the death penalty in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Pp. 228-229. (c) This Court rejects the State's contention that, at the time Stringer's conviction became final and before Clemons, it would have been a new rule to apply the Godfrey and Maynard holdings to the Mississippi sentencing system because of differences between the use of aggravating factors in that system and their use in the Georgia system in Godfrey. The principal—and critical—difference between the two schemes is that Mississippi, unlike Georgia, is a "weighing" State, in which a jury that has found a defendant guilty of capital murder and found at least one statutory aggravating factor must weigh such factors against the mitigating evidence. Zant v. Stephens, 462 U. S. 862, 890, expressly left open the possibility that in a weighing State infection of the process with an invalid aggravating factor might require invalidation of the death sentence. Although Clemons later held that the appellate court in such a case could reweigh the aggravating and mitigating circumstances or undertake harmless-error analysis, this Court has not suggested that the Eighth Amendment permits a weighing-state appellate court to affirm a death sentence without a thorough analysis of the role an invalid aggravating factor played in the sentencing process, but has required such courts to implement the well-established requirement of individualized sentencing determinations in death penalty cases, see, e. g., Zant, supra, at 879. In a nonweighing State, so long as the sentencing body finds at least one valid aggravating factor, the fact that it also finds an invalid factor does not infect the formal process of deciding whether death is appropriate. But when the sentencing body is told to weigh an invalid factor in its decision, the weighing process itself has been skewed. Thus, the fact that Mississippi is a weighing State only gives emphasis to the requirement that aggravating factors be defined with some degree of precision and underscores the applicability of Godfrey and Maynard to the Mississippi system. Pp. 229-232. (d) Moreover, precedent existing at the time Stringer's sentence became final defeats the State's contention that before Clemons it was reasonable to believe that there was no constitutional requirement to define aggravating factors with precision in the Mississippi system. Lowenfield v. Phelps, 484 U. S. 231, distinguished. It is important that the Mississippi Supreme Court, the final authority on the meaning of Mississippi law, has at all times viewed the State's capital sentencing scheme as subject to Godfrey's dictates. See, e. g., Gilliard v. State, 428 So. 2d 576. The correctness of that view as a matter of federal law is so evident that the issue was not even mentioned in Clemons, in which the Court, unchallenged by the State, took for granted the propo-
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