Justice REHNQUIST delivered the opinion of the Court.

In this case we address the question left open by our decision nearly 18 years ago in Witherspoon v. Illinois, 391 U.S. 510: Does the Constitution prohibit the removal for cause, prior to the guilt phase of a bifurcated capital trial, of prospective jurors whose opposition to the death penalty is so strong that it would prevent or substantially impair the performance of their duties as jurors at the sentencing phase of the trial? We hold that it does not.

Respondent Ardia McCree filed a habeas corpus petition in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas claiming that such removal for cause violated the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments and, after McCree's case was consolidated with another habeas case involving the same claim on remand from the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, the District Court ruled in McCree's favor and granted habeas relief. A sharply divided Eighth Circuit affirmed, creating a conflict with recent decisions of the Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits. We granted certiorari to resolve the conflict, and now reverse the judgment of the Eighth Circuit.

On the morning of February 14, 1978, a combination gift shop and service station in Camden, Arkansas, was robbed, and Evelyn Boughton, the owner, was shot and killed. That afternoon, Ardia McCree was arrested in Hot Springs, Arkansas, after a police officer saw him driving a maroon and white Lincoln Continental matching an eyewitness' description of the getaway car used by Boughton's killer. The next evening, McCree admitted to police that he had been at Boughton's shop at the time of the murder. He claimed, however, that a tall black stranger wearing an overcoat first asked him for a ride, then took McCree's rifle out of the back of the car and used it to kill Boughton. McCree also claimed that, after the murder, the stranger rode with McCree to a nearby dirt road, got out of the car, and walked away with the rifle. McCree's story was contradicted by two eyewitnesses who saw McCree's car between the time of the murder and the time when McCree said the stranger got out and walked away, and who stated that they saw only one person in the car. The police found McCree's rifle and a bank bag from Boughton's shop alongside the dirt road. Based on ballistics tests, a Federal Bureau of Investigation officer testified that the bullet that killed Boughton had been fired from McCree's rifle.

McCree was charged with capital felony murder in violation of Ark.Stat.Ann.  41-1501(1)(a) (1977). In accordance with Arkansas law, the trial judge at voir dire removed for cause, over McCree's objections, those prospective jurors who stated that they could not under any circumstances vote for the imposition of the death penalty. Eight prospective jurors were excluded for this reason. The jury convicted McCree of capital felony murder, but rejected the State's request for the death penalty, instead setting McCree's punishment at life imprisonment without parole. McCree's conviction was affirmed on direct appeal, and his petition for state post-conviction relief was denied.

McCree then filed a federal habeas corpus petition raising, inter alia, the claim that "death qualification," or the removal for cause of the so-called "Witherspoon-excludable" prospective jurors,¹ violated his right under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to have his guilt or innocence determined by an impartial jury selected from a representative cross section of the community. By stipulation of the parties, this claim was consolidated with another pending habeas case involving the same claim, which had been remanded by the Eighth Circuit for an evidentiary hearing in the District Court. The District Court denied the remainder of McCree's petition, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed.

The District Court held a hearing on the "death qualification" issue in July 1981, receiving in evidence numerous social science studies concerning the attitudes and beliefs of "Witherspoon -excludables," along with the potential effects of excluding them from the jury prior to the guilt phase of a bifurcated capital trial. In August 1983, the court concluded, based on the social science evidence, that "death qualification" produced juries that "were more prone to convict" capital defendants than "non-death-qualified" juries. The court ruled that "death qualification" thus violated both the fair-cross-section and impartiality requirements of the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, and granted McCree habeas relief.

The Eighth Circuit found "substantial evidentiary support" for the District Court's conclusion that the removal for cause of "Witherspoon-excludables" resulted in "conviction-prone" juries, and affirmed the grant of habeas relief on the ground that such removal for cause violated McCree's constitutional right to a jury selected from a fair cross section of the community. The Eighth Circuit did not address McCree's impartiality claim. The Eighth Circuit left it up to the discretion of the State "to construct a fair process" for future capital trials that would comply with the Sixth Amendment. Four judges dissented.

[The Court first examined several studies cited by McRee to support his proposition that death-qualified juries are more likely to convict defendants in the guilt phase. The Court concluded that the data the studies produced was unconvincing]

[H]aving identified some of the more serious problems with McCree's studies, however, we will assume for purposes of this opinion that the studies are both methodologically valid and adequate to establish that "death qualification" in fact produces juries somewhat more "conviction-prone" than "non-death-qualified" juries. We hold, nonetheless, that the Constitution does not prohibit the States from "death qualifying" juries in capital cases.

The Eighth Circuit ruled that "death qualification" violated McCree's right under the Sixth Amendment, as applied to the States via incorporation through the Fourteenth Amendment, see Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, to a jury selected from a representative cross section of the community. But we do not believe that the fair-cross-section requirement can, or should, be applied as broadly as that court attempted to apply it. We have never invoked the fair- cross-section principle to invalidate the use of either for-cause or peremptory challenges to prospective jurors, or to require petit juries, as opposed to jury panels or venires, to reflect the composition of the community at large.¹⁴ The limited scope of the fair-cross-section requirement is a direct and inevitable consequence of the practical impossibility of providing each criminal defendant with a truly "representative" petit jury, a basic truth that the Court of Appeals itself acknowledged for many years prior to its decision in the instant case. We remain convinced that an extension of the fair-cross-section requirement to petit juries would be unworkable and unsound, and we decline McCree's invitation to adopt such an extension.

But even if we were willing to extend the fair-cross-section requirement to petit juries, we would still reject the Eighth Circuit's conclusion that "death qualification" violates that requirement. The essence of a "fair-cross- section" claim is the systematic exclusion of "a 'distinctive' group in the community." In our view, groups defined solely in terms of shared attitudes that would prevent or substantially impair members of the group from performing one of their duties as jurors, such as the "Witherspoon-excludables" at issue here, are not "distinctive groups" for fair-cross-section purposes.

We have never attempted to precisely define the term "distinctive group," and we do not undertake to do so today. But we think it obvious that the concept of "distinctiveness" must be linked to the purposes of the fair-cross-section requirement. In Taylor, we identified those purposes as (1) "guard[ing] against the exercise of arbitrary power" and ensuring that the "commonsense judgment of the community" will act as "a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor," (2) preserving "public confidence in the fairness of the criminal justice system," and (3) implementing our belief that "sharing in the administration of justice is a phase of civic responsibility."

Our prior jury-representativeness cases, whether based on the fair-cross-section component of the Sixth Amendment or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, have involved such groups as blacks, see Peters v. Kiff, 407 U.S. 493 (equal protection); women, see Duren (fair cross section); and Mexican-Americans, see Castaneda v. Partida, 430 U.S. 482 (equal protection). The wholesale exclusion of these large groups from jury service clearly contravened all three of the aforementioned purposes of the fair-cross-section requirement. Because these groups were excluded for reasons completely unrelated to the ability of members of the group to serve as jurors in a particular case, the exclusion raised at least the possibility that the composition of juries would be arbitrarily skewed in such a way as to deny criminal defendants the benefit of the common-sense judgment of the community. In addition, the exclusion from jury service of large groups of individuals not on the basis of their inability to serve as jurors, but on the basis of some immutable characteristic such as race, gender, or ethnic background, undeniably gave rise to an "appearance of unfairness." Finally, such exclusion improperly deprived members of these often historically disadvantaged groups of their right as citizens to serve on juries in criminal cases.

The group of "Witherspoon-excludables" involved in the case at bar differs significantly from the groups we have previously recognized as "distinctive." "Death qualification," unlike the wholesale exclusion of blacks, women, or Mexican-Americans from jury service, is carefully designed to serve the State's concededly legitimate interest in obtaining a single jury that can properly and impartially apply the law to the facts of the case at both the guilt and sentencing phases of a capital trial. There is very little danger, therefore, and McCree does not even argue, that "death qualification" was instituted as a means for the State to arbitrarily skew the composition of capital-case juries.¹⁶

Furthermore, unlike blacks, women, and Mexican-Americans, "Witherspoon-excludables" are singled out for exclusion in capital cases on the basis of an attribute that is within the individual's control. It is important to remember that not all who oppose the death penalty are subject to removal for cause in capital cases; those who firmly believe that the death penalty is unjust may nevertheless serve as jurors in capital cases so long as they state clearly that they are willing to temporarily set aside their own beliefs in deference to the rule of law. Because the group of "Witherspoon-excludables" includes only those who cannot and will not conscientiously obey the law with respect to one of the issues in a capital case, "death qualification" hardly can be said to create an "appearance of unfairness."

Finally, the removal for cause of "Witherspoon-excludables" in capital cases does not prevent them from serving as jurors in other criminal cases, and thus leads to no substantial deprivation of their basic rights of citizenship. They are treated no differently than any juror who expresses the view that he would be unable to follow the law in a particular case.

In sum, "Witherspoon-excludables," or for that matter any other group defined solely in terms of shared attitudes that render members of the group unable to serve as jurors in a particular case, may be excluded from jury service without contravening any of the basic objectives of the fair-cross-section requirement. It is for this reason that we conclude that "Witherspoon-excludables" do not constitute a "distinctive group" for fair-cross-section purposes, and hold that "death qualification" does not violate the fair-cross-section requirement.

McCree argues that, even if we reject the Eighth Circuit's fair-cross-section holding, we should affirm the judgment below on the alternative ground, adopted by the District Court, that "death qualification" violated his constitutional right to an impartial jury. McCree concedes that the individual jurors who served at his trial were impartial, as that term was defined by this Court in cases such as Irvin v. Dowd ("It is sufficient if the juror can lay aside his impression or opinion and render a verdict based on the evidence presented in court"), and Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. (8 Otto) (1879). He does not claim that pretrial publicity, see Rideau v. Louisiana, 373 U.S. 723, ex parte communications, see Remmer v. United States, 347 U.S. 227, or other undue influence, see Estes v. Texas, 381 U.S. 532, affected the jury's deliberations. In short, McCree does not claim that his conviction was tainted by any of the kinds of jury bias or partiality that we have previously recognized as violative of the Constitution. Instead, McCree argues that his jury lacked impartiality because the absence of "Witherspoon-excludables" "slanted" the jury in favor of conviction.

We do not agree. McCree's "impartiality" argument apparently is based on the theory that, because all individual jurors are to some extent predisposed towards one result or another, a constitutionally impartial jury can be constructed only by "balancing" the various predispositions of the individual jurors. Thus, according to McCree, when the State "tips the scales" by excluding prospective jurors with a particular viewpoint, an impermissibly partial jury results. We have consistently rejected this view of jury impartiality, including as recently as last Term when we squarely held that an impartial jury consists of nothing more than "jurors who will conscientiously apply the law and find the facts." Wainwright v. Witt.

The view of jury impartiality urged upon us by McCree is both illogical and hopelessly impractical. McCree characterizes the jury that convicted him as "slanted" by the process of "death qualification." But McCree admits that exactly the same 12 individuals could have ended up on his jury through the "luck of the draw," without in any way violating the constitutional guarantee of impartiality. Even accepting McCree's position that we should focus on the jury rather than the individual jurors, it is hard for us to understand the logic of the argument that a given jury is unconstitutionally partial when it results from a state-ordained process, yet impartial when exactly the same jury results from mere chance. On a more practical level, if it were true that the Constitution required a certain mix of individual viewpoints on the jury, then trial judges would be required to undertake the Sisyphean task of "balancing" juries, making sure that each contains the proper number of Democrats and Republicans, young persons and old persons, white-collar executives and blue-collar laborers, and so on. Adopting McCree's concept of jury impartiality would also likely require the elimination of peremptory challenges, which are commonly used by both the State and the defendant to attempt to produce a jury favorable to the challenger. . . .

Justice MARSHALL, with whom Justice BRENNAN and Justice STEVENS join, dissenting.

[W]ith a glib nonchalance ill suited to the gravity of the issue presented and the power of respondent's claims, the Court upholds a practice that allows the State a special advantage in those prosecutions where the charges are the most serious and the possible punishments, the most severe. The State's mere announcement that it intends to seek the death penalty if the defendant is found guilty of a capital offense will, under today's decision, give the prosecution license to empanel a jury especially likely to return that very verdict. Because I believe that such a blatant disregard for the rights of a capital defendant offends logic, fairness, and the Constitution, I dissent. . . .

Faced with the near unanimity of authority supporting respondent's claim that death qualification gives the prosecution a particular advantage in the guilt phase of capital trials, the majority here makes but a weak effort to contest that proposition. Instead, it merely assumes for the purposes of this opinion "that 'death qualification' in fact produces juries somewhat more 'conviction-prone' than 'non-death-qualified' juries," and then holds that this result does not offend the Constitution. This disregard for the clear import of the evidence tragically misconstrues the settled constitutional principles that guarantee a defendant the right to to a fair trial and an impartial jury whose composition is not biased toward the prosecution.

In Witherspoon, the Court observed that a defendant convicted by a jury from which those unalterably opposed to the death penalty had been excluded "might still attempt to establish that the jury was less than neutral with respect to guilt." Respondent has done just that. And I believe he has succeeded in proving that his trial by a jury so constituted violated his right to an impartial jury, guaranteed by both the Sixth Amendment and principles of due process. We therefore need not rely on respondent's alternative argument that death qualification deprived him of a jury representing a fair cross section of the community.⁶

Respondent does not claim that any individual on the jury that convicted him fell short of the constitutional standard for impartiality. Rather, he contends that, by systematically excluding a class of potential jurors less prone than the population at large to vote for conviction, the State gave itself an unconstitutional advantage at his trial. Thus, according to respondent, even though a nonbiased selection procedure might have left him with a jury composed of the very same individuals that actually sat on his panel, the process by which those 12 individuals were chosen violated the Constitution.

I am puzzled by the diffculty that the majority has in understanding the "logic of the argument." For the logic is precisely that which carried the day in Witherspoon, and which has never been repudiated by this Court-- not even today, if the majority is to be taken at its word. There was no question in Witherspoon that if the defendant's jury had been chosen by the "luck of the draw," the same 12 jurors who actually sat on his case might have been selected. Nonetheless, because the State had removed from the pool of possible jurors all those expressing general opposition to the death penalty, the Court overturned the defendant's conviction, declaring "that a State may not entrust the determination of whether a man should live or die to a tribunal organized to return a verdict of death." Witherspoon had been denied a fair sentencing determination, the Court reasoned, not because any member of his jury lacked the requisite constitutional impartiality, but because the manner in which that jury had been selected "stacked the deck" against him. Here, respondent adopts the approach of the Witherspoon Court and argues simply that the State entrusted the determination of his guilt and the level of his culpability to a tribunal organized to convict.

The Court offers but two arguments to rebut respondent's constitutional claim. First, it asserts that the "State's reasons for adhering to its preference for a single jury to decide both the guilt and penalty phases of a capital trial are sufficient to negate the inference which the Court drew in Witherspoon concerning the lack of any neutral justification for the Illinois rule on jury challenges." This argument, however, does not address the question whether death qualification infringes a defendant's constitutional interest in "a completely fair determination of guilt or innocence." It merely indicates the state interest that must be considered once an infringement of that constitutional interest is found.

The Court's second reason for rejecting respondent's challenge to the process that produced his jury is that the notion of "neutrality" adumbrated in Witherspoon must be confined to "the special context of capital sentencing, where the range of jury discretion necessarily gave rise to far greater concern over the possible effects of an 'imbalanced' jury." But in the wake of this Court's decision in Adams v. Texas, this distinction is simply untenable.

In Adams, this Court applied the principles of Witherspoon to the Texas death-penalty scheme. Under that scheme, if a defendant is convicted of a capital offense, a separate sentencing proceeding is held at which additional aggravating or mitigating evidence is admissible. The jury then must answer three questions based on evidence adduced during either phase of the trial:

If the jury finds beyond a reasonable doubt that the answer to each of these questions is "yes," the court must impose a death sentence; a single "no" answer requires the court to impose a sentence of life imprisonment. With the role of the jury so defined, Adams held that Texas could not constitutionally exclude every prospective juror unable to state under oath that "the mandatory penalty of death or imprisonment for life will not affect his deliberations on any issue of fact." Tex.Penal Code Ann.  12.31(b) (1974). The "process" of answering the statutory questions, the Court observed, "is not an exact science, and the jurors under the Texas bifurcated procedure unavoidably exercise a range of judgment and discretion while remaining true to their instructions and their oaths." Consequently, while Texas could constitutionally exclude jurors whose scruples against the death penalty left them unable "to answer the statutory questions without conscious distortion or bias," it could not exclude those

The message of Adams is thus that even where the role of the jury at the penalty stage of a capital trial is limited to what is essentially a factfinding role, the right to an impartial jury established in Witherspoon bars the State from skewing the composition of its capital juries by excluding scrupled jurors who are nonetheless able to find those facts without distortion or bias. This proposition cannot be limited to the penalty stage of a capital trial, for the services that Adams' jury was called upon to perform at his penalty stage "are nearly indistinguishable" from those required of juries at the culpability phase of capital trials. Gillers, Proving the Prejudice of Death-Qualified Juries after Adams v. Texas, 47 U.Pitt.L.Rev. 219, 247 (1985). Indeed, Justice REHNQUIST noted in Adams that he could "see no plausible distinction between the role of the jury in the guilt/innocence phase of the trial and its role, as defined by the State of Texas, in the sentencing phase." Contrary to the majority's suggestion, this point was at no time repudiated by the Adams Court. And the absence of a reply to Justice REHNQUIST was not an oversight. At the penalty stage of his trial, Adams' jury may have been called upon to do something more than ascertain the existence vel non of specific historical facts. Yet the role assigned a jury at a trial's culpability phase is little different, for there the critical task of the jury will frequently be to determine not whether defendant actually inflicted the fatal wound, but rather whether his level of culpability at the time of the murder makes conviction on capital murder charges, as opposed to a lesser count, more appropriate. Representing the conscience of the community, the jurors at both stages "unavoidably exercise a range of judgment and discretion while remaining true to their instructions and their oaths."

Adams thus provides clear precedent for applying the analysis of Witherspoon to the guilt phase of a criminal trial. Indeed, respondent's case is even stronger than Witherspoon's. The Court in Witherspoon merely presumed that the exclusion of scrupled jurors would unacceptably increase the likelihood that the defendant would be condemned to death. Respondent here has gone much further and laid a solid empirical basis to support his claim that the juries produced by death qualification are substantially more likely to convict.

One need not rely on the analysis and assumptions of Adams and Witherspoon to demonstrate that the exclusion of opponents of capital punishment capable of impartially determining culpability infringes a capital defendant's constitutional right to a fair and impartial jury. For the same conclusion is compelled by the analysis that in Ballew v. Georgia led a majority of this Court to hold that a criminal conviction rendered by a five-person jury violates the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Faced with an effort by Georgia to reduce the size of the jury in a criminal case beyond the six-member jury approved by this Court in Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78, this Court articulated several facets of the inquiry whether the reduction impermissibly "inhibit[ed] the functioning of the jury as an institution to a significant degree." Ballew at 1034. First, the Court noted that "recent empirical data" had suggested that a five-member jury was "less likely to foster effective group deliberation" and that such a decline in effectiveness would likely lead "to inaccurate factfinding and incorrect application of the common sense of the community to the facts." The Court advanced several explanations for this phenomenon:

The Court also cited empirical evidence suggesting "that the verdicts of jury deliberation in criminal cases will vary as juries become smaller, and that the variance amounts to an imbalance to the detriment of one side, the defense." Lastly, the Court observed that further reductions in jury size would also foretell problems "for the representation of minority groups in the community."

Each of the concerns that led this Court in Ballew to find that a misdemeanor defendant had been deprived of his constitutional right to a fair trial by jury is implicated by the process of death qualification, which threatens a defendant's interests to an even greater extent in cases where the stakes are substantially higher. When compared to the juries that sit in all other criminal trials, the death-qualified juries of capital cases are likely to be deficient in the quality of their deliberations, the accuracy of their results, the degree to which they are prone to favor the prosecution, and the extent to which they adequately represent minority groups in the community.

The data considered here, as well as plain common sense, leave little doubt that death qualification upsets the "counterbalancing of various biases" among jurors that Ballew identified as being so critical to the effective functioning of juries. . . . [W]ith even more clarity than the data considered in Ballew, the studies adduced by respondent show a broad pattern of "biased decisionmaking." It is not merely that the jurors who survive death qualification are more likely to accept the word of the prosecution and be satisfied with a lower standard of proof than those who are excluded. The death-qualified jurors are actually more likely to convict than their peers. Whether the verdict against a particular capital defendant will actually be different depends on the strength of the evidence against him, the likelihood that, absent death qualification, one or more Witherspoon-excludables would have sat on his jury, and a host of other factors. However, Ballew points to the importance of considering the effects of a particular jury procedure over a range of cases, and not focusing on the fairness of any single trial. Because it takes only one juror unwilling to find that the prosecution has met its burden for a trial to end in either a mistrial or a compromise verdict, "it can be confidently asserted that, over time, some persons accused of capital crimes will be convicted of offenses-- and to a higher degree-- who would not be so convicted" had all persons able to assess their guilt impartially been permitted to sit on their juries. Hovey v. Superior Court, 28 Cal.3d 1.

Death qualification also implicates the Ballew Court's concern for adequate representation of minority groups. Because opposition to capital punishment is significantly more prevalent among blacks than among whites, the evidence suggests that death qualification will disproportionately affect the representation of blacks on capital juries. Though perhaps this effect may not be sufficient to constitute a violation of the Sixth Amendment's fair-cross-section principle, it is similar in magnitude to the reduction in minority representation that the Ballew Court found to be of "constitutional significance" to a defendant's right to a fair jury trial.

The principle of "impartiality" invoked in Witherspoon is thus not the only basis for assessing whether the exclusion of jurors unwilling to consider the death penalty but able impartially to determine guilt infringes a capital defendant's constitutional interest in a fair trial. By identifying the critical concerns that are subsumed in that interest, the Ballew Court pointed to an alternative approach to the issue, drawing on the very sort of empirical data that respondent has presented here. And viewed in light of the concerns articulated in Ballew, the evidence is sufficient to establish that death qualification constitutes a substantial threat to a defendant's Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment right to a fair jury trial-- a threat constitutionally acceptable only if justified by a sufficient state interest. . . .