Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-83.ZD1.html
Timestamp: 2015-03-29 11:43:33
Document Index: 688446717

Matched Legal Cases: ['§9', '§9', '§9', '§9', '§9', '§9']

Between trial and sentencing, respondent Arturo Recuenco’s prosecutor switched gears. The information charged Recuenco with assault in the second degree, and further alleged that at the time of the assault, he was armed with a deadly weapon. App. 3. Without enhancement, the assault charge Recuenco faced carried a sentence of 3 to 9 months, id., at 15; Wash. Rev. Code §§9.94A.510, 9A.36.021(1)(c) (2004); the deadly weapon enhancement added one mandatory year to that sentence, §9.94A.533(4)(b).1 The trial judge instructed the jury on both the assault charge and the deadly weapon enhancement. App. 7, 8. In connection with the enhancement, the judge gave the jurors a special verdict form and instructed them to answer “Yes or No” to one question only: “Was the defendant … armed with a deadly weapon at the time of the commission of the crime of Assault in the Second Degree?” Id., at 13. The jury answered: “Yes.” Ibid.
Under Washington law and practice, assault with a deadly weapon and assault with a firearm are discrete charges, attended by discrete instructions. As the Court observes, ante, at 2, a charge of second-degree assault while armed with a deadly weapon, §9.94A.533(4)(b), subjects a defendant to an additional year in prison, and a charge of second-degree assault while armed with a firearm, §9.94A.533(3)(b), calls for an additional term of three years. “Deadly weapon,” Washington law provides, encompasses any “implement or instrument which has the capacity to inflict death and from the manner in which it is used, is likely to produce or may easily and readily produce death,” including, inter alia, a “pistol, revolver, or any other firearm.” §9.94A.602. “Firearm” is defined, more particularly, to mean “a weapon or device from which a projectile or projectiles may be fired by an explosive such as gunpowder.” §9.41.010(1). A handgun (the weapon Recuenco held), it thus appears, might have been placed in both categories.2
In the Court’s view, “this case is indistinguishable from Neder [v. United States, 527 U. S. 1 (1999)
].” Ante, at 6. In that case, the trial judge made a finding necessary to fill a gap in an incomplete jury verdict. One of the offenses involved was tax fraud; the element missing from the jury’s instruction was the materiality of the defendant’s alleged misstatements. Under the mistaken impression that materiality was a question reserved for the court, the trial judge made the finding himself. In fact in Neder, materiality was not in dispute. See 527 U. S., at 7; see also id., at 15 (Neder “d[id] not suggest that he would introduce any evidence bearing upon the issue of materiality if so allowed.”). “Reversal without any consideration of the effect of the error upon the verdict would [have] sen[t] the case back for retrial—a retrial not focused at all on the issue of materiality, but on contested issues on which the jury [had been] properly instructed.” Ibid. The Court concluded that the Sixth Amendment did not command that recycling.
Had the prosecutor alternatively charged both enhancements, and hadthe judge accurately and adequately instructed on both, giving the jury a special verdict form on each of the two enhancements, the jury would have had the prerogative to choose the lower enhancement. Specifically, the jury could have answered “Yes” (as it in fact did, see supra, at 4) to the “armed with a deadly weapon” inquiry while returning no response to the alternative “firearm” inquiry. See, supra, at 3, and n. 2 (Washington’s statutory definition of “deadly weapon” overlaps definition of “firearm”); cf. United States v. Martin Linen Supply Co., 430 U. S. 564, 573 (1977)
(“[R]egardless of how overwhelmingly the evidence may point in that direction[, t]he trial judge is … barred from attempting to override or interfere with the jurors’ independent judgment in a manner contrary to the interests of the accused.”). Today’s decision, advancing a greater excluded (from jury control) offense notion, diminishes the jury’s historic capacity “to prevent the punishment from getting too far out of line with the crime.” United States v. Maybury, 274 F. 2d 899, 902 (CA2 1960) (Friendly, J.); see also Blakely v. Washington, 542 U. S. 296, 306 (2004)
(recognizing jury’s role “as circuitbreaker in the State’s machinery of justice”).
In sum, Recuenco, charged with one crime (assault with a deadly weapon), was convicted of another (assault with a firearm), sans charge, jury instruction, or jury verdict. That disposition, I would hold, is incompatible with the Fifth and Sixth Amendment s, made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment . I would therefore affirm the judgment of the Supreme Court of the State of Washington.
1 Since Recuenco was charged, some of the relevant statutory provisions have been renumbered, without material revision. For convenience, we follow the Court’s and the parties’ citation practice and refer to the current provisions.
2 But see App. 38. When the prosecutor, post-trial but presentence, made it plain that he was seeking the three-year firearm enhancement rather than the one-year deadly weapon enhancement, Recuenco objected that the statutory definition of “firearm” had not been read to the jury, and that the prosecutor had submitted no evidence showing that Recuenco’s handgun was “designed to fire a projectile by explosive such as gunpowder.” Ibid.