166
Opinion of Kennedy, J.
that contradicts our prior holdings or if it reaches a different result from one of our cases despite confronting indistinguishable facts. The statute also authorizes federal habeas corpus relief if, under clearly established federal law, a state court has been unreasonable in applying the governing legal principle to the facts of the case. A state determination may be set aside under this standard if, under clearly established federal law, the state court was unreasonable in refusing to extend the governing legal principle to a context in which the principle should have controlled. The Virginia Supreme Court's ruling in the case before us was neither contrary to Simmons nor an unreasonable application of its rationale.
Petitioner contends his case is indistinguishable from Simmons, making the Virginia Supreme Court's refusal to grant relief contrary to that case. In his view the Pizza Hut conviction and the Domino's guilty verdict classified him, like the Simmons petitioner, as ineligible for parole when the jury deliberated his sentence. He makes this argument even though the Virginia Supreme Court declared that he was not parole ineligible at the time of the sentencing trial because no judgment of conviction had been entered for the Domino's crime.
Simmons created a workable rule. The parole-ineligibility instruction is required only when, assuming the jury fixes the sentence at life, the defendant is ineligible for parole under state law. 512 U. S., at 156 (plurality opinion) (limiting holding to situations where "state law prohibits the defendant's release on parole"); id., at 165, n. 5 (relying on fact that Simmons was "ineligible for parole under state law"); id., at 176 (O'Connor, J., concurring) (citing state statutes to demonstrate that for Simmons "the only available alternative sentence to death . . . was life imprisonment without [the] possibility of parole"). The instruction was required in Simmons because it was agreed that "an instruction informing the jury
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