742
Scalia, J., dissenting
tiality of a judge). Indeed, it is precisely because such individual juror "biases" are constitutionally permissible that Witherspoon v. Illinois imposed the limitation that a State may not skew the makeup of the jury as a whole by excluding all death-scrupled jurors. 391 U. S., at 519-523.
II
In the Court's view, a juror who will always impose the death penalty upon proof of the required aggravating factors 1 "will fail in good faith to consider the evidence of aggravating and mitigating circumstances as the instructions require him to do." Ante, at 729 (emphasis added); see also ante, at 738-739. I would agree with that if it were true that the instructions required jurors to deem certain evidence to be "mitigating" and to weigh that evidence in deciding the penalty. On that hypothesis, the juror's firm attachment to the death penalty would demonstrate an absence of the constitutionally requisite impartiality, which requires that the decisionmaker be able "conscientiously [to] apply the law and find the facts." Witt, supra, at 423; see also Lockhart v. McCree, 476 U. S. 162, 178 (1986); Adams, supra, at 45. The hypothesis, however, is not true as applied to the facts of the present case. Remarkably, the Court rests its
1 It is important to bear in mind that the juror who will ignore the requirement of finding an aggravating factor is not at issue here. Petitioner does not contend that the voir dire question he seeks is necessary because the death-inclined juror will not impartially make the strictly factual determination, at the first stage of Illinois' two-part sentencing procedure, that the defendant is eligible for the death penalty because one of the statutorily required aggravating factors exists (in this case, the fact that the murder was a contract killing). Obviously, the standard question whether the juror can obey the court's instructions is enough to disclose that difficulty. Petitioner's theory—which the Court accepts, ante, at 735-736—is that the special voir dire question is necessary to identify those veniremen who, at the second, weighing stage, after having properly found the aggravating factor, "will never find enough mitigation to preclude imposing death." Brief for Petitioner 8.
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