Cite as: 538 U. S. 11 (2003)
Opinion of O'Connor, J.
is entirely consistent with this Court's prior cases—including Rummel v. Estelle").
Eight years after Solem, we grappled with the proportionality issue again in Harmelin. Harmelin was not a recidivism case, but rather involved a first-time offender convicted of possessing 672 grams of cocaine. He was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. A majority of the Court rejected Harmelin's claim that his sentence was so grossly disproportionate that it violated the Eighth Amendment. The Court, however, could not agree on why his proportionality argument failed. Justice Scalia, joined by The Chief Justice, wrote that the proportionality principle was "an aspect of our death penalty jurisprudence, rather than a generalizable aspect of Eighth Amendment law." 501 U. S. at 994. He would thus have declined to apply gross disproportionality principles except in reviewing capital sentences. Ibid.
Justice Kennedy, joined by two other Members of the Court, concurred in part and concurred in the judgment. Justice Kennedy specifically recognized that "[t]he Eighth Amendment proportionality principle also applies to noncapital sentences." Id., at 997. He then identified four principles of proportionality review—"the primacy of the legislature, the variety of legitimate penological schemes, the nature of our federal system, and the requirement that proportionality review be guided by objective factors"—that "inform the final one: The Eighth Amendment does not require strict proportionality between crime and sentence. Rather, it forbids only extreme sentences that are 'grossly disproportionate' to the crime." Id., at 1001 (citing Solem, supra, at 288). Justice Kennedy's concurrence also stated that Solem "did not mandate" comparative analysis "within and between jurisdictions." 501 U. S., at 1004-1005.
The proportionality principles in our cases distilled in Justice Kennedy's concurrence guide our application of the
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