536
Opinion of the Court
sonable to think that the trial court's review would at least constitute the sort of "reweighing" that would satisfy Clemons v. Mississippi, 494 U. S. 738 (1990), see also Stringer, 503 U. S., at 237. In fact, given the view of some Members of this Court that appellate reweighing was inconsistent with the Eighth Amendment, see, e. g., Cabana v. Bullock, 474 U. S. 376, 400-401, 404 (1986) (Blackmun, J., dissenting, joined by Brennan and Marshall, JJ.); Clemons, supra, at 769-772 (Blackmun, J., joined by Brennan, Marshall, and Stevens, JJ., concurring in part and dissenting in part), it would have been reasonable to think that trial-court re-weighing was preferable. As one Court of Appeals was prompted to note, "Clemons's holding, which arguably points in the opposite direction from Espinosa, indicates that even in 1990 Espinosa's result would not have been dictated by precedent." Glock v. Singletary, 65 F. 3d, at 887 (en banc).
That Espinosa announced a new rule is strongly confirmed by our decision in Walton v. Arizona, 497 U. S. 639 (1990). Although decided after petitioner's conviction became final, Walton is a particularly good proxy for what a reasonable jurist would have thought in 1986, given that the only relevant cases decided by this Court in the interim were Maynard and Clemons, the holdings of both of which, we later
aggravating and mitigating factors. Moreover, this procedure has been previously upheld against constitutional challenge." Grossman v. State, 525 So. 2d 833, 840 (Fla. 1988) (emphasis added; citations omitted). "It is clear . . . that the prosecutor correctly stated the law in Florida: the judge is the sentencing authority and the jury's role is merely advisory." Id., at 839. It is not our burden, of course, to establish that these statements in Grossman, or in the other cases we rely upon, were accurate; as we later determined, they were wrong and the dissent's (current) reading of Tedder is correct. But the question before us is whether a reasonable jurist could have disagreed with the dissent's interpretation of Tedder at the time of Lambrix's conviction. In treating as relevant to that question only that portion of precedent vindicated by later decisions, Justice Stevens "endues the jurist with prescience, not reasonableness." Stringer v. Black, 503 U. S. 222, 244 (1992) (Souter, J., dissenting).
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