Cite as: 512 U. S. 1 (1994)
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
Amendment jurisprudence instructs, capital sentencing procedures must be especially reliable. See id., at 323 (prosecutor's comments were "inconsistent with the Eighth Amendment's heightened 'need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case' "), quoting Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U. S., at 305; 472 U. S., at 341 (death sentence "does not meet the standard of reliability that the Eighth Amendment requires," when it may have been affected by the State's attempt "to minimize the jury's sense of responsibility for determining the appropriateness of death"). Under Caldwell's reasoning, diminution of jurors' sense of responsibility violates the Eighth Amendment's reliability requirement, whether or not a defendant can demonstrate empirically that the effect of this diminution was to bias the jurors' judgment toward death. According to Caldwell, if a reviewing court "cannot say" that an effort "to minimize the jury's sense of responsibility for determining the appropriateness of death . . . had no effect on the sentencing decision, . . . [t]he sentence of death must . . . be vacated" as unreliable. Ibid.
III
The Court today reads Caldwell to apply only if the jury has been "affirmatively misled regarding its role in the sentencing process." Ante, at 9. According to the Court, because no information, incorrect when conveyed, was given to the jury responsible for sentencing Romano for Sarfaty's murder, "[t]he infirmity identified in Caldwell is simply absent in this case." Ibid.
The Court rests its rendition of Caldwell on the premise that only a plurality of the Court's Members endorsed the principle I regard as pivotal: Diminution of the jury's sense of responsibility "preclude[s] the jury from properly performing its [charge] to make an individualized determination of the appropriateness of the death penalty." See ante, at 8, citing Caldwell, 472 U. S., at 330-331, 341. In fact, however,
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