532
Opinion of the Court
ited aggravator, the sentencing trial judge in Espinosa did find the HAC aggravator under a properly limited construction. See Espinosa, 505 U. S., at 1082, citing Walton v. Arizona, 497 U. S. 639, 653 (1990).4 A close examination of the Florida death penalty scheme persuades us that a reasonable jurist considering Lambrix's sentence in 1986 could have reached a conclusion different from the one Espinosa announced in 1992. There were at least three different, but somewhat related, approaches that would have suggested a different outcome: (1) The mere cabining of the trial court's discretion would avoid arbitrary imposition of the death penalty, and thus avoid unconstitutionality. In Proffitt v. Florida, supra, we upheld the Florida death penalty scheme against the contention that it resulted in arbitrary imposition of the death penalty, see Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153, 188 (1976), because "trial judges are given specific and detailed guidance to assist them in deciding whether to impose a death penalty or imprisonment for life" and because the Florida Supreme
4 Justice Stevens's dissent says that "[g]iven that the judge's instruction to the jury failed to narrow the HAC aggravator, there is no reason to believe that [the trial judge] appropriately narrowed the [HAC] factor in his . . . deliberations." Post, at 545. Our cases establish that there is always a "reason to believe" that, which we consider fully adequate: "Trial judges are presumed to know the law and to apply it in making their decisions. If the [State] Supreme Court has narrowed the definition of the [HAC] aggravating circumstance, we presume that [state] trial judges are applying the narrower definition." Walton v. Arizona, 497 U. S., at 653. Without abandoning our precedent, the most Justice Stevens can argue is that the ordinary presumption is overcome by failure to instruct. The factual support for such an argument is questionable: Judges fail to instruct juries about rules of law they are aware of all the time. Moreover, if the argument were correct, the holding in Espinosa itself would have been unnecessary: We could have simply said there (as Justice Stevens would have us say here) that the failure to instruct on the narrowing construction displayed the judge's ignorance of the narrowing construction. Instead, of course, Espinosa cited the passage from Walton quoted above. Espinosa, 505 U. S., at 1082.
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