Cite as: 508 U. S. 275 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
Fifth Amendment violation of prosecutorial comment upon the defendant's failure to testify would not require reversal of the conviction if the State could show "beyond a reasonable doubt that the error complained of did not contribute to the verdict obtained." Id., at 24. The Chapman standard recognizes that "certain constitutional errors, no less than other errors, may have been 'harmless' in terms of their effect on the factfinding process at trial." Delaware v. Van Arsdall, 475 U. S. 673, 681 (1986). Although most constitutional errors have been held amenable to harmless-error analysis, see Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U. S. 279, 306-307 (1991) (opinion of Rehnquist, C. J., for the Court) (collecting examples), some will always invalidate the conviction. Id., at 309-310 (citing, inter alia, Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U. S. 335 (1963) (total deprivation of the right to counsel); Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U. S. 510 (1927) (trial by a biased judge); McKaskle v. Wiggins, 465 U. S. 168 (1984) (right to self-representation)). The question in the present case is to which category the present error belongs.
Chapman itself suggests the answer. Consistent with the jury-trial guarantee, the question it instructs the reviewing court to consider is not what effect the constitutional error might generally be expected to have upon a reasonable jury, but rather what effect it had upon the guilty verdict in the case at hand. See Chapman, supra, at 24 (analyzing effect of error on "verdict obtained"). Harmless-error review looks, we have said, to the basis on which "the jury actually rested its verdict." Yates v. Evatt, 500 U. S. 391, 404 (1991) (emphasis added). The inquiry, in other words, is not whether, in a trial that occurred without the error, a guilty verdict would surely have been rendered, but whether the guilty verdict actually rendered in this trial was surely unattributable to the error. That must be so, because to hypothesize a guilty verdict that was never in fact rendered—no matter how inescapable the findings to support that verdict might be—would violate the jury-trial guarantee. See Rose
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