Cite as: 520 U. S. 518 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
jury's consideration of a vague aggravator can be cured by appellate review. Thus, in Godfrey itself, we were less concerned about the failure to instruct the jury properly than we were about the Georgia Supreme Court's failure to narrow the facially vague aggravator on appeal. Had the Georgia Supreme Court applied a narrowing construction of the aggravator, we would have rejected the Eighth Amendment challenge to Godfrey's death sentence, notwithstanding the failure to instruct the jury on that narrowing construction. Godfrey, supra, at 431-432. Likewise in Maynard, we stressed that the vague HAC aggravator had not been sufficiently limited on appeal by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals "to cure the unfettered discretion of the jury." 486 U. S., at 364.
We reached a similar conclusion in Clemons v. Mississippi,
applied retroactively to February 1985 in Stringer. Clemons considered the question whether the sentencer's weighing of a vague HAC aggravator rendered that sentence unconstitutional in a "weighing" State. The sentencing jury in Clemons, as in Maynard, was given a HAC instruction that was unconstitutionally vague. We held that "the Federal Constitution does not prevent a state appellate court from upholding a death sentence that is based in part on an invalid or improperly defined aggravating circumstance either by reweighing of the aggravating and mitigating evidence or by harmless-error review." Clemons, supra, at 741, 745; see also Stringer, supra, at 230.
The principles of the above-described cases do not dictate the result we ultimately reached in Espinosa. Florida, unlike Oklahoma, see Maynard, supra, at 360, had given its facially vague HAC aggravator a limiting construction sufficient to satisfy the Constitution. See Proffitt v. Florida, 428 U. S., at 255-256 ( joint opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.); id., at 260 (White, J., concurring in judgment). Thus, unlike the sentencing juries in Clemons, Maynard, and Godfrey, who were not instructed with a properly lim-
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