Cite as: 527 U. S. 1 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
think our decisions in Pope, Carella, and Roy dictate the answer to that question.
Forced to accept that this Court has applied harmless-error review in cases where the jury did not render a "complete verdict" on every element of the offense, Neder attempts to reconcile our cases by offering an approach gleaned from a plurality opinion in Connecticut v. Johnson, 460 U. S. 73 (1983), an opinion concurring in the judgment in Carella, supra, and language in Sullivan, supra. Under this restrictive approach, an instructional omission, mis-description, or conclusive presumption can be subject to harmless-error analysis only in three "rare situations": (1) where the defendant is acquitted of the offense on which the jury was improperly instructed (and, despite the defendant's argument that the instruction affected another count, the improper instruction had no bearing on it); (2) where the defendant admitted the element on which the jury was improperly instructed; and (3) where other facts necessarily found by the jury are the "functional equivalent" of the omitted, misdescribed, or presumed element. See Sullivan, supra, at 281; Carella, supra, at 270-271 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment); Johnson, supra, at 87 (plurality opinion). Neder understandably contends that Pope, Carella, and Roy fall within this last exception, which explains why the Court in those cases held that the instructional error could be harmless.
We believe this approach is mistaken for more than one reason. As an initial matter, we are by no means certain that the cases just mentioned meet the "functional equivalence" test as Neder at times articulates it. See Brief for Petitioner 29 ("[A]ppellate courts [cannot be] given even the slightest latitude to review the record to 'fill the gaps' in a jury verdict, as 'minor' as those gaps may seem"). In Pope, for example, there was necessarily a "gap" between what the jury did find (that the allegedly obscene material lacked value under "community standards") and what it was re-
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