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Opinion of the Court
statute preclude the sentencer from considering any mitigating factor, neither may the sentencer refuse to consider, as a matter of law, any relevant mitigating evidence." Id., at 113-114 (emphasis omitted); see also Hitchcock v. Dugger, 481 U. S. 393, 394 (1987); Skipper v. South Carolina, 476 U. S. 1, 4-5 (1986). The Eddings opinion rested on Lockett and made no mention of Jurek.
We cannot say that reasonable jurists considering petitioner's claim in 1984 would have felt that these cases "dictated" vacatur of petitioner's death sentence. See Teague, 489 U. S., at 301. To the contrary, to most readers at least, these cases reasonably would have been read as upholding the constitutional validity of Texas' capital sentencing scheme with respect to mitigating evidence and otherwise. Lockett expressly embraced the Jurek holding, and Eddings signaled no retreat from that conclusion. It seems to us that reasonable jurists in 1984 would have found that, under our cases, the Texas statute satisfied the commands of the Eighth Amendment: It permitted petitioner to place before the jury whatever mitigating evidence he could show, including his age, while focusing the jury's attention upon what that evidence revealed about the defendant's capacity for deliberation and prospects for rehabilitation.
We find nothing in our more recent cases, to the extent they are relevant, that would undermine this analysis. In 1988, in Franklin v. Lynaugh, 487 U. S. 164, we rejected a claim that the Texas special issues provided an inadequate vehicle for jury consideration of evidence of a defendant's clean prison disciplinary record. There, a plurality of the Court observed that "[i]n resolving the second Texas Special Issue, the jury was surely free to weigh and evaluate petitioner's disciplinary record as it bore on his 'character'—that is, his 'character' as measured by his likely future behavior." Id., at 178. Moreover, the plurality found
"unavailing petitioner's reliance on this Court's statement in Eddings, 455 U. S., at 114, that the sentencing
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