The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a major victory to death penalty prosecutors in five states Thursday, rejecting appeals affecting about 130 death row inmates who were sentenced under procedures the court later ruled unconstitutional.

In a pair of 5-4 rulings, the court said two previous decisions that favored defendants -- a 2002 case on the right to a jury and a 1988 case on jurors' ability to vote for a life sentence -- applied only to prisoners who hadn't yet completed their first round of appeals at the time, and not to those who had already lost their appeals.

"When a criminal defendant has had a full trial and one round of appeals in which the state faithfully applied the Constitution as we understood it at the time, he may (not) continue to litigate his claims indefinitely in hopes that we will one day have a change of heart,'' Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority in a case from Arizona.

Dissenters said a prisoner whose trial was constitutionally flawed should not be executed.

The public will now witness "two individuals, both sentenced through the use of unconstitutional procedures, one individual going to his death, the other saved, all through an accident of timing,'' said Justice Stephen Breyer.

But the majority in the Arizona case, and a second case from Pennsylvania, relied on a barrier that the court had established against defendants in a 1989 ruling -- that newly pronounced constitutional standards generally can't be used to revive old cases.

The Arizona ruling overturned a decision last year by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and affects 86 death sentences in Arizona, 15 in Idaho, five in Nebraska and four in Montana, said lawyers in the case. All had similar laws allowing judges, rather than juries, to make the crucial finding that a defendant's crime fit into a category covered by the death penalty.

The Supreme Court ruled two years ago, in another Arizona case, that the constitutional right to a jury trial requires juries to make those findings.