Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/230

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ESTELLE v. McGUIRE Opinion of the Court

relief. See Marshall v. Lonberger, 459 U. S. 422, 438, n. 6 (1983) (“[T]he Due Process Clause does not permit the federal courts to engage in a finely tuned review of the wisdom of state evidentiary rules”). Federal habeas courts therefore do not grant relief, as might a state appellate court, simply because the instruction may have been deficient in comparison to the CALJIC model. Nor do our habeas powers allow us to reverse McGuire’s conviction based on a belief that the trial judge incorrectly interpreted the California Evidence Code in ruling that the prior injury evidence was admissible as bad acts evidence in this case. See Cal. Evid. Code Ann. § 1101(b) (West 1988). The only question for us is “whether the ailing instruction by itself so infected the entire trial that the resulting conviction violates due process.” Cupp v. Naughten, 414 U. S. 141, 147 (1973); see also Henderson v. Kibbe, 431 U. S. 145, 154 (1977); Donnelly v. DeChristoforo, 416 U. S. 637, 643 (1974) (“ ‘[I]t must be established not merely that the instruction is undesirable, erroneous, or even “universally condemned,” but that it violated some [constitutional] right’ ”). It is well established that the instruction “may not be judged in artificial isolation,” but must be considered in the context of the instructions as a whole and the trial record. Cupp v. Naughten, supra, at 147. In addition, in reviewing an ambiguous instruction such as the one at issue here, we inquire “whether there is a reasonable likelihood that the jury has applied the challenged instruction in a way” that violates the Constitution. Boyde v. California, 494 U. S. 370, 380 (1990).4 And we also bear 4 We acknowledge that language in the later cases of Cage v. Louisiana, 498 U. S. 39 (1990), and Yates v. Evatt, 500 U. S. 391 (1991), might be read as endorsing a different standard of review for jury instructions. See Cage, supra, at 41 (“In construing the instruction, we consider how reasonable jurors could have understood the charge as a whole”); Yates, supra, at 401 (“We think a reasonable juror would have understood the [instruction] to mean . . .”). In Boyde, however, we made it a point to settle on a single standard of review for jury instructions—the “reasonable likelihood” standard—after considering the many different phrasings that had