2014—In State v. Gleason, the Kansas supreme court rules by a 5-2 vote that the Eighth Amendment requires a capital-sentencing court to instruct a jury that mitigating circumstances need not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

In January 2016, in the consolidated ruling styled Kansas v. Carr, the Supreme Court will reverse the Kansas ruling. In his opinion for eight justices, Justice Scalia “doubt[s] whether it is even possible to apply a standard of proof to the mitigating-factor determination” and explains that the Court’s case law does not require any such jury instruction. (Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, does not disagree on this point but instead opines that the Court should not have reviewed the Kansas ruling.)