280
Opinion of the Court
v. Clark, 478 U. S. 570, 578 (1986); id., at 593 (Blackmun, J., dissenting); Pope v. Illinois, 481 U. S. 497, 509-510 (1987) (Stevens, J., dissenting).
Once the proper role of an appellate court engaged in the Chapman inquiry is understood, the illogic of harmless-error review in the present case becomes evident. Since, for the reasons described above, there has been no jury verdict within the meaning of the Sixth Amendment, the entire premise of Chapman review is simply absent. There being no jury verdict of guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt, the question whether the same verdict of guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt would have been rendered absent the constitutional error is utterly meaningless. There is no object, so to speak, upon which harmless-error scrutiny can operate. The most an appellate court can conclude is that a jury would surely have found petitioner guilty beyond a reasonable doubt—not that the jury's actual finding of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt would surely not have been different absent the constitutional error. That is not enough. See Yates, supra, at 413-414 (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). The Sixth Amendment requires more than appellate speculation about a hypothetical jury's action, or else directed verdicts for the State would be sustainable on appeal; it requires an actual jury finding of guilty. See Bollenbach v. United States, 326 U. S. 607, 614 (1946).
Insofar as the possibility of harmless-error review is concerned, the jury-instruction error in this case is quite different from the jury-instruction error of erecting a presumption regarding an element of the offense. A mandatory presumption—for example, the presumption that a person intends the ordinary consequences of his voluntary acts—violates the Fourteenth Amendment, because it may relieve the State of its burden of proving all elements of the offense. Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U. S. 510 (1979); Francis v. Franklin, 471 U. S. 307 (1985). But "[w]hen a jury is instructed to presume malice from predicate facts, it still must
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