Bunkley v. Florida

Chief Justice Rehnquist, with whom Justice Kennedy and Justice Thomas join,

dissenting.

The Court here makes new law, and does so without briefing or argument. In Fiore v. White, 528 U. S. 23, 29 (1999), we granted certiorari to answer whether due process requires a state court to apply a judicially announced change in state criminal law retroactively. We realized after granting certiorari, however, that we could not answer that question until we knew whether there had been a change in the law at all. We therefore certified a question to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court asking whether its…