stating that “[eligibility factors almost of necessity require an answer to a question with a factual nexus to the crime or the defendant so as to ‘make rationally reviewable the process for imposing a sentence of death,’ ” while “[t]he selection decision ... requires individualized sentencing and must be expansive enough to accommodate relevant mitigating evidence so as to assure an assessment of the defendant’s culpability” (quoting Arave v. Creech, 507 U.S. 463, 471, 113 S.Ct. 1534, 123 L.Ed.2d 188 (1993))
How later courts described this case
- stating that “[eligibility factors almost of necessity require an answer to a question with a factual nexus to the crime or the defendant so as to ‘make rationally reviewable the process for imposing a sentence of death,’ ” while “[t]he selection decision ... requires individualized sentencing and must be expansive enough to accommodate relevant mitigating evidence so as to assure an assessment of the defendant’s culpability” (quoting Arave v. Creech, 507 U.S. 463, 471, 113 S.Ct. 1534, 123 L.Ed.2d 188 (1993))
- stating that “[e]ligibility factors almost of necessity require an answer to a question with a factual nexus to the crime or the defendant so as to ‘make rationally reviewable the process for imposing a sentence of death,’ ” while “[t]he selection decision . . . requires individualized sentencing and must be expansive enough to accommodate relevant mitigating evidence so as to assure an assessment of the defendant’s culpability” (quoting Arave v. Creech, 507 U.S. 463, 471 (1993))
- holding that “[a] capital sentencer need not be instructed how to weigh any particular fact in the capital sentencing decision” and reaffirming that “the sentencer may be given ‘unbridled discretion in determining whether the death penalty should be imposed after it has found that the defendant is a member of the class made eligible for that penalty’”
- explaining that a defendant is eligible for the death penalty only after the trier of fact convicts him of homicide and finds at least one aggravating circumstance, and noting that the trier may find such circumstance at the guilt phase rather than the punishment phase
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Justice Souter,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion because it correctly recognizes that factors adequate to perform the function of genuine narrowing, as well as factors that otherwise guide the jury in selecting which defendants receive the death penalty, are not *981 susceptible to mathematical precision; they must depend for their requisite clarity on embodying a “common-sense core of meaning,” as Justice White put it in Jurek v. Texas, 428 U. S. 262, 279 (1976) (concurring opinion). Taking factor (b) to be essentially propositional, as the Court uses the term, ante, at 974-975,1 find it is sufficiently clear to pass muster; and I agree with the Court’s analysis of factor (i) and the challenged portion of factor (a), neither of which is framed as a proposition.