528
Opinion of the Court
conviction was apparent to all reasonable jurists. See, e. g., Graham v. Collins, 506 U. S. 461, 477 (1993); Butler v. Mc-Kellar, 494 U. S. 407, 415 (1990); id., at 417-418 (Brennan, J., dissenting).
In Espinosa, we determined that the Florida capital jury
is, in an important respect, a cosentencer with the judge. As we explained: "Florida has essentially split the weighing process in two. Initially, the jury weighs aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and the result of that weighing process is then in turn weighed within the trial court's process of weighing aggravating and mitigating circumstances." 505 U. S., at 1082. We then concluded that the jury's consideration of a vague aggravator tainted the trial court's sentence because the trial court gave deference to the jury verdict (and thus indirectly weighed the vague aggravator) in the course of weighing the aggravating and mitigating circumstances. Ibid. We reasoned that this indirect weighing created the same risk of arbitrariness as the direct weighing of an invalid aggravating factor. Ibid.2
In our view, Espinosa was not dictated by precedent, but announced a new rule which cannot be used as the basis for federal habeas corpus relief. It is significant that Espinosa itself did not purport to rely upon any controlling precedent.3
2 Our description of the holding of Espinosa in the preceding paragraph of text is so clear that we are at a loss to explain Justice Stevens's impression that we accord Espinosa the "novel interpretation" that "the constitutional error in the jury instruction will 'automatically render a defendant's sentence unconstitutional.' " Post, at 541 (dissenting opinion) (quoting infra, at 530). The sentence from which the phrase quoted by Justice Stevens is wrenched (so violently that the word "not" which precedes it is omitted) is not discussing the holding of Espinosa; indeed, it does not even mention Espinosa; nor does the entire paragraph or the previous or subsequent paragraphs.
3 Justice Stevens maintains that this statement is proved wrong by Espinosa's citation of Godfrey v. Georgia, 446 U. S. 420 (1980), and Tedder v. State, 322 So. 2d 908 (Fla. 1975). Post, at 541, n. 2. This is wordplay. While those two cases can be called "controlling authority" in the sense that the two propositions they established (that an instruction to the
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