342
Opinion of the Court
cided after respondent's conviction and sentence became final, it did not work a change in the law favoring criminal defendants, and therefore may be considered in our Teague analysis. See Lockhart v. Fretwell, 506 U. S. 364, 373 (1993). Nevertheless, Boyde was a capital case, with respect to which we have held that the Eighth Amendment requires a greater degree of accuracy and factfinding than would be true in a noncapital case. See Herrera v. Collins, 506 U. S. 390, 399 (1993); Beck v. Alabama, 447 U. S. 625 (1980). Outside of the capital context, we have never said that the possibility of a jury misapplying state law gives rise to federal constitutional error. To the contrary, we have held that instructions that contain errors of state law may not form the basis for federal habeas relief. Estelle v. McGuire, 502 U. S. 62 (1991).
Moreover, under the standard fashioned in Boyde, the relevant inquiry is "whether there is a reasonable likelihood that the jury has applied the challenged instruction in a way that prevents the consideration of constitutionally relevant evidence." 494 U. S., at 380. In Boyde, the petitioner argued that the trial court's instruction on California's "catch-all" factor for determining whether a defendant should be sentenced to death restricted the jury's consideration of certain mitigating evidence. Since "[t]he Eighth Amendment requires that the jury be able to consider and give effect to all relevant mitigating evidence," id., at 377-378, this evidence was plainly constitutionally relevant. In this case, by contrast, petitioner argues that the challenged instructions prevented the jury from considering evidence of his affirmative defense. But in a noncapital case such as this there is no counterpart to the Eighth Amendment's doctrine of "constitutionally relevant evidence" in capital cases.
The Court of Appeals also relied on the plurality opinion in Connecticut v. Johnson, 460 U. S. 73 (1983). That case dealt with the question whether an instruction that violates due process under Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U. S. 510
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