164
Opinion of the Court
of a defendant's prospects for commutation or parole is unconstitutional).
The general proposition that the States retained the prerogative to determine how much (if at all) juries would be informed about the postsentencing legal regime was given further credence in Caldwell v. Mississippi, supra. In that case, the prosecution and the judge had, the Court concluded, improperly left the jury with the impression that a death sentence was not final because it would be extensively reviewed. Justice Marshall authored the opinion for the Court except for one portion. In that portion, Justice Marshall—writing for a plurality—concluded that, Ramos notwithstanding, sentencing juries were not to be given information about postsentencing appellate proceedings. Justice O’Connor, who provided the fifth vote necessary to the judgment, did not join this portion of Justice Marshall's opinion. She wrote separately, stating that, under Ramos, a State could choose whether or not to "instruc[t] the jurors on the sentencing procedure, including the existence and limited nature of appellate review," so long as any information it chose to provide was accurate. 472 U. S., at 342 (opinion concurring in part and concurring in judgment).
3
In light of Ramos and Caldwell, we think it plain that a reasonable jurist in 1988 would not have felt compelled to adopt the rule later set out in Simmons. As noted above, neither Gardner nor Skipper involved a prohibition on imparting information concerning what might happen, under then-extant law, after a sentence was imposed. Rather, the information at issue in each case was information pertaining to the defendant's "character and record." Although the principal opinions in Simmons found Skipper (which, in turn, relied on Gardner) persuasive, Justice O’Connor distinguished Skipper from the facts presented in Simmons on this very ground, see 512 U. S., at 176 (opinion concurring
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