364
Opinion of the Court
upheld the constitutionality of the Texas system as a general matter in Jurek, he claimed that the special issues did not allow the jury to give adequate weight to his mitigating evidence concerning his good prison disciplinary record and that the jury, therefore, should have been instructed that it could consider this mitigating evidence independent of the special issues. 487 U. S., at 171-172. A plurality of the Court rejected the defendant's claim, holding that the second special issue provided an adequate vehicle for consideration of the defendant's prison record as it bore on his character. Id., at 178. The plurality also noted that Jurek foreclosed the defendant's argument that the jury was still entitled to cast an "independent" vote against the death penalty even if it answered yes to the special issues. 487 U. S., at 180. The plurality concluded that, with its special issues system, Texas had guided the jury's consideration of mitigating evidence while still providing for sufficient jury discretion. See id., at 182. Although Justice O'Connor expressed reservations about the Texas scheme for other cases, she agreed that the special issues had not inhibited the jury's consideration of the defendant's mitigating evidence in that case. See id., at 183-186 (opinion concurring in judgment).
The third case in which we considered the Texas statute is the pivotal one from petitioner's point of view, for there we set aside a capital sentence because the Texas special issues did not allow for sufficient consideration of the defendant's mitigating evidence. Penry v. Lynaugh, supra. In Penry, the condemned prisoner had presented mitigating evidence of his mental retardation and childhood abuse. We agreed that the jury instructions were too limited for the appropriate consideration of this mitigating evidence in light of Penry's particular circumstances. We noted that "[t]he jury was never instructed that it could consider the evidence offered by Penry as mitigating evidence and that it could give mitigating effect to that evidence in imposing sentence." 492 U. S., at 320. Absent any definition for the term "delib-
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