Washington ? The Supreme Court closed off appeals for more than 100 death row inmates Thursday, blunting the effect of an earlier ruling that judges cannot determine by themselves whether a convicted killer should die.

By a 5-4 vote, the court refused to make its 2002 ruling, which stipulated that juries impose death sentences, retroactive to condemned inmates who had already exhausted all their direct appeals. The ruling means at least four states — Arizona, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska — won’t have to hold new sentencing hearings or allow death sentences to be reduced to life in prison.

In a separate ruling Thursday, the high court opened the door to new death row challenges on other grounds in Texas, which leads the nation in the number of executions. A third capital punishment ruling preserved a death sentence for a Pennsylvania serial killer.

The most significant of the day’s death penalty rulings answered a question left from the court’s unexpectedly forceful statement two years ago that the constitutional right to a jury trial extends to the then-unremarkable practice of allowing a judge to have the final say in death cases.

That ruling overturned the death sentencing laws of five states in which a jury or judge determined an accused killer’s guilt but judges alone determined if circumstances such as multiple victims or particular brutality made a convicted killer eligible for the death penalty.

The 2002 ruling applied to some death row inmates and to new cases moving through the courts. But a conservative-led Supreme Court majority said Thursday that the principles at stake in the case do not rise to the level that force a wholesale re-examination of convictions that already have run their course.