466
Opinion of the Court
Twenty-one years after that, in State v. Ruane, 912 S. W. 2d 766 (Tenn. Crim. App. 1995), a defendant referred to the rule in arguing that the operative cause of his victim's death was removal of life support rather than a gunshot wound at the defendant's hand. The victim had died within 10 days of receiving the wound. The Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the defendant's argument, concluding, as it had in this case, that the year and a day rule had been abolished by the 1989 Act. It went on to hold that the evidence of causation was sufficient to support the conviction. Id., at 773-777. Ruane, of course, was decided after petitioner committed his crime, and it concluded that the year and a day rule no longer existed in Tennessee for a reason that the high court of that State ultimately rejected. But we note the case nonetheless to complete our account of the few appearances of the common law rule in the decisions of the Tennessee courts.
These cases hardly suggest that the Tennessee court's decision was "unexpected and indefensible" such that it offended the due process principle of fair warning articulated in Bouie and its progeny. This is so despite the fact that, as Justice Scalia correctly points out, the court viewed the year and a day rule as a "substantive principle" of the common law of Tennessee. See post, at 480. As such, however, it was a principle in name only, having never once been enforced in the State. The Supreme Court of Tennessee also emphasized this fact in its opinion, see 992 S. W. 2d, at 402, and rightly so, for it is surely relevant to whether the court's abolition of the rule in petitioner's case violated due process limitations on retroactive judicial decisionmaking. And while we readily agree with Justice Scalia that fundamental due process prohibits the punishment of conduct that cannot fairly be said to have been criminal at the time the conduct occurred, see, e. g., post, at 470, 478, 480, nothing suggests that is what took place here.
There is, in short, nothing to indicate that the Tennessee court's abolition of the rule in petitioner's case represented
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