14
Opinion of the Court
quired to find to convict (that the material lacked value under a national "reasonable person" standard). Petition-er's submission would have mandated reversal for a new trial in that case, because a juror in Rockford, Illinois, who found that the material lacked value under community standards, would not necessarily have found that it did so under presumably broader and more tolerant national standards. But since we held that harmless-error analysis was appropriate in Pope, that case not only does not support petitioner's approach, but rejects it.
Petitioner 's submission also imports into the initial structural-error determination (i. e., whether an error is structural) a case-by-case approach that is more consistent with our traditional harmless-error inquiry (i. e., whether an error is harmless). Under our cases, a constitutional error is either structural or it is not. Thus, even if we were inclined to follow a broader "functional equivalence" test (e. g., where other facts found by the jury are "so closely related" to the omitted element "that no rational jury could find those facts without also finding" the omitted element, Sullivan, 508 U. S., at 281 (internal quotation marks omitted)), such a test would be inconsistent with our traditional categorical approach to structural errors.
We also note that the present case arose in the legal equivalent of a laboratory test tube. The trial court, following existing law, ruled that the question of materiality was for the court, not the jury. It therefore refused a charge on the question of materiality. But future cases are not likely to be so clear cut. In Roy, we said that the error in question could be "as easily characterized as a 'misdescription of an element' of the crime, as it is characterized as an error of 'omission.' " 519 U. S., at 5. As petitioner concedes, his submission would thus call into question the far more common subcategory of misdescriptions. And it would require a reviewing court in each case to determine just how serious a "misdescription" it was.
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