236
Opinion of the Court
use of a vague aggravating factor in the weighing process creates the possibility not only of randomness but also of bias in favor of the death penalty, we cautioned in Zant that there might be a requirement that when the weighing process has been infected with a vague factor the death sentence must be invalidated.
Nothing in Lowenfield suggests that the proscription of vague aggravating factors does not apply to a capital sentencing system like Mississippi's. Lowenfield did not involve a claim that a statutory aggravating factor was ambiguous, and its relevance to Godfrey, which it did not find it necessary to cite, or the line of cases following from Godfrey, is slight at best.
We also note that the State's reliance on Lowenfield to show that it could not have anticipated Godfrey's application to Mississippi is somewhat odd. For Lowenfield, after all, was decided when the petitioner's conviction and sentence already were final. It is a fiction for the State to contend that in 1984 its courts relied on a 1988 decision. This is not to say that a State could not rely on a decision announced after a petitioner's conviction and sentence became final to defeat his claim on the merits. It could. Insofar as our new rule jurisprudence "validates reasonable, good-faith interpretations of existing precedents," Butler v. McKellar, 494 U. S., at 414, however, the State may have little cause to complain if in deciding to allow a petitioner to rely upon a decision the federal courts look only to those precedents which the state courts knew at the relevant time. In any event, we need not dwell on the anachronism inherent in the State's Lowenfield argument because, as we have concluded, that case does not provide a basis for concluding that it was a new rule to apply Godfrey to the Mississippi system.
The State next argues that Clemons' application of Godfrey to Mississippi could not have been dictated by precedent because prior to Clemons the Fifth Circuit concluded that Godfrey did not apply to Mississippi. See Evans v. Thigpen,
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