Cite as: 513 U. S. 432 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
of proof burdens (e. g., "Do I believe the party has borne its burden of showing . . . ?"). As Chief Justice Traynor said:
"Whether or not counsel are helpful, it is still the responsibility of the . . . court, once it concludes there was error, to determine whether the error affected the judgment. It must do so without benefit of such aids as presumptions or allocated burdens of proof that expedite fact-finding at the trial." R. Traynor, The Riddle of Harmless Error 26 (1970) (hereinafter Traynor).
The case may sometimes arise, however, where the record is so evenly balanced that a conscientious judge is in grave doubt as to the harmlessness of an error. See id., at 22-23. This is the narrow circumstance we address here.
III
Our legal conclusion—that in cases of grave doubt as to harmlessness the petitioner must win—rests upon three considerations. First, precedent supports our conclusion. As this Court has stated, "the original common-law harmless-error rule put the burden on the beneficiary of the error [here, the State] . . . to prove that there was no injury . . . ." Chapman v. California, 386 U. S. 18, 24 (1967) (citing 1 J. Wigmore, Evidence § 21 (3d ed. 1940)). When this Court considered the doubt-as-to-harmlessness question in the context of direct review of a nonconstitutional trial error, it applied the same rule. In Kotteakos v. United States, the Court wrote:
"If, when all is said and done, the [court's] conviction is sure that the error did not influence the jury, or had but very slight effect, the verdict and the judgment should stand . . . . But if one cannot say, with fair assurance, after pondering all that happened without stripping the erroneous action from the whole, that the judgment was not substantially swayed by the error, it is impossible to
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