340
Opinion of the Court
and acknowledged that actual innocence "does not translate easily into the context of an alleged error at the sentencing phase of a trial on a capital offense." Id., at 537. We decided that the habeas petitioner in that case had failed to show actual innocence of the death penalty because the "alleged constitutional error neither precluded the development of true facts nor resulted in the admission of false ones." Id., at 538.
In subsequent cases, we have emphasized the narrow scope of the fundamental miscarriage of justice exception. In Dugger v. Adams, 489 U. S. 401 (1989), we rejected the petitioner's claim that his procedural default should be excused because he had shown that he was actually innocent. Without endeavoring to define what it meant to be actually innocent of the death penalty, we stated that "[d]emonstrating that an error is by its nature the kind of error that might have affected the accuracy of a death sentence is far from demonstrating that an individual defendant probably is 'actually innocent' of the sentence he or she received." Id., at 412, n. 6. Just last Term in McCleskey v. Zant, supra, at 502, we held that the "narrow exception" for miscarriage of justice was of no avail to the petitioner because the constitutional violation, if it occurred, "resulted in the admission at trial of truthful inculpatory evidence which did not affect the reliability of the guilt determination."
The present case requires us to further amplify the meaning of "actual innocence" in the setting of capital punishment. A prototypical example of "actual innocence" in a colloquial sense is the case where the State has convicted the wrong person of the crime. Such claims are of course regularly made on motions for new trial after conviction in both state and federal courts, and quite regularly denied because the evidence adduced in support of them fails to meet the rigorous standards for granting such motions. But in rare instances it may turn out later, for example, that another person has credibly confessed to the crime, and it is evident
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