10
Opinion of the Court
(mandatory rebuttable presumption); Carella v. California, 491 U. S. 263 (1989) (per curiam) (mandatory conclusive presumption); Pope v. Illinois, 481 U. S. 497 (1987) (mis-statement of element); Rose, supra (mandatory rebuttable presumption). In other cases, we have recognized that improperly omitting an element from the jury can "easily be analogized to improperly instructing the jury on an element of the offense, an error which is subject to harmless-error analysis." Johnson, supra, at 469 (citations omitted); see also California v. Roy, 519 U. S. 2, 5 (1996) (per curiam) ("The specific error at issue here—an error in the instruction that defined the crime—is . . . as easily characterized as a 'misdescription of an element' of the crime, as it is characterized as an error of 'omission' "). In both cases—misdescriptions and omissions—the erroneous instruction precludes the jury from making a finding on the actual element of the offense. The same, we think, can be said of conclusive presumptions, which direct the jury to presume an ultimate element of the offense based on proof of certain predicate facts (e. g., "You must presume malice if you find an intentional killing"). Like an omission, a conclusive presumption deters the jury from considering any evidence other than that related to the predicate facts (e. g., an intentional killing) and "directly foreclose[s] independent jury consideration of whether the facts proved established certain elements of the offens[e]" (e. g., malice). Carella, 491 U. S., at 266; see id., at 270 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).
The conclusion that the omission of an element is subject to harmless-error analysis is consistent with the holding (if not the entire reasoning) of Sullivan v. Louisiana, the case upon which Neder principally relies. In Sullivan, the trial court gave the jury a defective "reasonable doubt" instruction in violation of the defendant's Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to have the charged offense proved beyond a reasonable doubt. See Cage v. Louisiana, 498 U. S. 39 (1990) (per curiam). Applying our traditional mode of anal-
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