Cite as: 521 U. S. 151 (1997)
Stevens, J., dissenting
consensus among the scholars and practitioners who drafted the Model Penal Code is that instructing the jury completely about the available sentencing alternatives is the best way to ensure accuracy in sentencing. See American Law Institute, Model Penal Code § 210.6 (1980). And we affirmed this basic point in Beck v. Alabama, 447 U. S. 625, 637 (1980), when we acknowledged that the likelihood that a jury would find an obviously guilty defendant eligible for the death penalty was significantly increased when an arguably more appropriate sentencing alternative was not available.
Thus, even if the rule in Simmons could properly be viewed as a "new" rule, it is of such importance to the accuracy and fairness of a capital sentencing proceeding that it should be applied consistently to all prisoners whose death sentences were imposed in violation of the rule, whether they were sentenced before Simmons was decided or after. Moreover, to the extent that the fundamental principles underlying the rule needed explicit articulation by this Court, they clearly had been expressed well before petitioner's 1988 sentencing proceeding.
II
Distinguishing new rules from those that are not new under our post-Teague jurisprudence is not an easy task, but it is evident to me that if there is such a thing as a rule that is not new for these purposes, the rule announced in Simmons is one.
In Gardner v. Florida, 430 U. S. 349 (1977), a plurality of the Court concluded that the defendant's due process rights had been violated because his "death sentence was imposed, at least in part, on the basis of information which he had no opportunity to deny or explain." Id., at 362. Nine years later, in Skipper v. South Carolina, 476 U. S. 1 (1986), all
to death"); Paduano & Smith, Deathly Errors: Juror Misperceptions Concerning Parole in the Imposition of the Death Penalty, 18 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 211 (1987).
173
Page: Index Previous 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007