584
Opinion of the Court
"courts have no authority to enforce [a] principl[e] gleaned solely from legislative history that has no statutory reference point." International Brotherhood of Elec. Workers, Local Union No. 474, AFL-CIO v. NLRB, 814 F. 2d 697, 712 (1987) (emphasis deleted). We thus conclude that there is no support in the Act for the instruction Shannon seeks.9
B
Setting the Act aside, Shannon argues that the instruction he proposes is required as a matter of general federal criminal practice. Presumably, Shannon asks us to invoke our supervisory power over the federal courts. According to Shannon, the instruction is necessary because jurors are generally unfamiliar with the consequences of an NGI verdict, and may erroneously believe that a defendant who is found NGI will be immediately released into society. Jurors who are under this mistaken impression, Shannon continues, may also fear that the defendant, if released, would pose a danger to the community. Shannon concludes that such jurors, in order to ensure that the defendant will not be released, may be tempted to return a guilty verdict in a case in which an NGI verdict would be appropriate.
Even assuming Shannon is correct that some jurors will harbor the mistaken belief that defendants found NGI will be released into society immediately—an assumption that is
9 In the court below, Shannon made the additional argument that because Congress filled the "gap" that had been identified by the Federal Courts of Appeals prior to the IDRA with a general federal civil commitment procedure, "the practice announced in Lyles must now be applied nationwide." 981 F. 2d 759, 763 (CA5 1993). We find this argument (which Shannon makes only implicitly before this Court) unpersuasive. As noted above, although the lack of a federal commitment procedure before the passage of the IDRA was one reason for rejecting a Lyles-type instruction, courts generally, and properly, relied additionally on the principle that juries are not to be concerned with the consequences of their verdicts. This principle is not altered by the fact that Congress established a civil commitment procedure. See Thigpen, 4 F. 3d, at 1577.
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