468
Opinion of the Court
See Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U. S. 314, 321, n. 6 (1987). Surveying the legal landscape as it then existed, we conclude that it would have been anything but clear to reasonable jurists in 1984 that petitioner's sentencing proceeding did not comport with the Constitution.
1
In the years since Furman v. Georgia, 408 U. S. 238 (1972), the Court has identified, and struggled to harmonize, two competing commandments of the Eighth Amendment. On one hand, as Furman itself emphasized, States must limit and channel the discretion of judges and juries to ensure that death sentences are not meted out "wantonly" or "freak-ishly." Id., at 310 (Stewart, J., concurring). On the other, as we have emphasized in subsequent cases, States must confer on the sentencer sufficient discretion to take account of the "character and record of the individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense" to ensure that "death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case." Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U. S. 280, 304-305 (1976) (plurality opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.).
Four years after Furman, and on the same day that Wood-son was announced, the Court in Jurek v. Texas, supra, examined the very statutory scheme under which Graham was sentenced and concluded that it struck an appropriate balance between these constitutional concerns. The Court thus rejected an attack on the entire statutory scheme for imposing the death penalty and in particular an attack on the so-called "special issues." It is well to set out how the Court arrived at its judgment. The joint opinion of Justices Stewart, Powell, and Stevens observed that while Texas had not adopted a list of aggravating circumstances that would justify the imposition of the death penalty, "its action in narrowing the categories of murders for which a death sentence may ever be imposed serves much the same purpose." Id., at 270. The joint opinion went on to say
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