654
O'Connor, J., dissenting
tion in favor of reliability be taken; and certainly 28 U. S. C. § 2254 does not impose such an obligation on its own. Indeed, I agree with the Court that habeas relief under § 2254 is reserved for those prisoners "whom society has 'grievously wronged.' " Ante, at 637. But prisoners who may have been convicted mistakenly because of constitutional trial error have suffered a grievous wrong and ought not be required to bear the greater risk of uncertainty the Court now imposes upon them. Instead, where constitutional error may have affected the accuracy of the verdict, on habeas we should insist on such proof as will restore our faith in the verdict's accuracy to a reasonable certainty. Adherence to the standard enunciated in Chapman requires no more; and the equities require no less.
To be sure, the harmless-error inquiry will not always bear on reliability. If the trial error being reviewed for harmlessness is not itself related to the interest of accuracy, neither is the harmless-error standard. Accordingly, in theory it would be neither illogical nor grudging to reserve Chapman for errors related to the accuracy of the verdict, applying Kotteakos' more lenient rule whenever the error is of a type that does not impair confidence in the trial's result. But the Court draws no such distinction. On the contrary, it holds Kotteakos applicable to all trial errors, whether related to reliability or not. The Court does offer a glimmer of hope by reserving in a footnote the possibility of an exception: Chapman may remain applicable, it suggests, in some "unusual" cases. But the Court's description of those cases suggests that its potential exception would be both exceedingly narrow and unrelated to reliability concerns. See ante, at 638, n. 9 (reserving the "possibility that in an unusual case, a deliberate and especially egregious error of the trial type" or error "combined with a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct, might so infect the integrity of the proceeding as to warrant the grant of habeas relief, even it did not substantially influence the jury's verdict").
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