Cite as: 527 U. S. 263 (1999)
Opinion of Souter, J.
facts it supports is not the Brady standard, and the significance of both brutality and sangfroid must surely have been complemented by a certainty that without Strickler there would have been no abduction and no ensuing murder.
The Court concludes that Stoltzfus's testimony is unlikely to have had significant influence on the jury's sentencing recommendation because the prosecutor made no mention of her testimony in his closing statement at the sentencing proceeding. See ante, at 295. But although the Court is entirely right that the prosecution gave no prominence to the Stoltzfus testimony at the sentencing stage, the Commonwealth's closing actually did include two brief references to Strickler's behavior in "just grabbing a complete stranger and abducting her," 19 Record 919; see also id., at 904, as relevant to the jury's determination of future dangerousness. And since Strickler's criminal record had no convictions involving actual violence, a point defense counsel stressed in his closing argument, see id., at 913, the jurors may well have given weight to Stoltzfus's lively portrait of Strickler as the aggressive leader of the group when they came to assess his future dangerousness.
What is more important, common experience, supported by at least one empirical study, see Bowers, Sandys, & Steiner, Foreclosed Impartiality in Capital Sentencing: Jurors' Predispositions, Guilt-Trial Experience, and Premature Decision Making, 83 Cornell L. Rev. 1476, 1486-1496 (1998), tells us that the evidence and arguments presented during the guilt phase of a capital trial will often have a significant effect on the jurors' choice of sentence. True, Stoltzfus's testimony directly discussed only the circumstances of Whit-lock's abduction, but its impact on the jury was almost certainly broader, as the prosecutor recognized. After the jury rendered its verdict on guilt, for example, the defense moved for a judgment of acquittal on the capital murder charge based on insufficiency of the evidence. In the prosecutor's argument to the court he replied that
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