856
Stevens, J., dissenting
rectly hold that prisoners have exhausted their state remedies, and have not procedurally defaulted their claims, when those prisoners had the right under state law to file a petition for rehearing from the last adverse state-court decision and failed to do so.
The presence or absence of exhaustion, in sum, tells us nothing about whether a prisoner has defaulted his constitutional claims. Exhaustion is purely a rule of timing and has played no role in the series of waiver decisions that fore-closed challenges to the composition of the grand jury, evidentiary rulings at trial, instructions to the jury, and finally, counsel's inadvertent error in failing to file a timely appeal from a state court's denial of collateral relief. The Court's reasons for progressively expanding its procedural default doctrine were best explained in the cases that arose in a trial setting. By failing to raise their constitutional objections at trial, defendants truly impinge state courts' ability to correct, or even to make a record regarding the effect of, legal errors. See Engle, 456 U. S., at 128; Wainwright, 433 U. S., at 90. Though I found that reasoning unsatisfactory in the state postconviction context, see Coleman, 501 U. S., at 758 (Blackmun, J., joined by Marshall and Stevens, JJ., dissenting), at least the Court did not make the analytical error that pervades its opinion today. It did not assume that there was any necessary connection between the question of exhaustion and the question of procedural default.
III
I come now to the real issue presented by this case: whether respondent's failure to include all six of his current claims in his petition for leave to appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court should result in his procedurally defaulting the three claims he did not raise.
The Court barely answers this question. Even though no one contends that respondent currently has any state remedy available to him, the Court concentrates instead on
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