Opinion ID: 2977371
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Acquitted Conduct and Constitutional History

Text: It is hard to overemphasize the importance of trial by jury for our revolutionary ancestors who wrote the Declaration of Independence, framed the Constitution, ratified it in state conventions, and explained it in the Federalist Papers.3 Suffice it here to mention a few historical facts. The Declaration of Independence took George III to task for “obstruct[ing] the Administration of Justice” by “depriving us in many cases of the benefit of Trial by Jury,” which included punishing colonists after the jury had acquitted them.4 The Constitution, Article III, § 2 (“The Trial of all Crimes . . . shall be by jury”) and its Sixth Amendment (“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a . . . public trial, by an impartial jury”) demonstrate the importance of restraining judges, legislators, and sentencing commissioners from punishing people for crimes the jury has rejected. Our case law over the last 200 years has repeatedly emphasized this point. As the Supreme Court explained in Apprendi: As a general rule, criminal proceedings were submitted to a jury after being initiated by an indictment containing “all the facts and circumstances which constitute the offence, . . . stated with such certainty and precision, that the defendant . . . may be enabled to determine the species of offence they constitute, in order that he may prepare his defence accordingly . . . and that there may be no doubt as to the judgment which should be given, if the defendant be convicted.” J. ARCHBOLD, PLEADING AND EVIDENCE IN CRIMINAL CASES 44 (15th ed. 1862). The defendant’s ability to predict with certainty the judgment from the face of the felony indictment flowed from the invariable linkage of punishment with crime. See 4 BLACKSTONE 369-370 (after verdict, and barring a defect in the indictment, pardon, or benefit of clergy, “the 3 See, e.g., THE FEDERALIST No. 83 (Alexander Hamilton) (“The friends and adversaries of the plan of the convention, if they agree in nothing else, concur at least in the value they set upon the trial by jury; or if there is any difference between them it consists in this: the former regard it as a valuable safeguard to liberty; the latter represent it as the very palladium of free government.”); see also Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466, 498 (2000) (Scalia, J., concurring) (noting that “the jury-trial guarantee was one of the least controversial provisions of the Bill of Rights”). 4 For an extended treatment of historical background in American trial by jury, See THURSTON GREENE, THE LANGUAGE OF THE CONSTITUTION: A SOURCEBOOK AND GUIDE TO THE IDEAS, TERMS, AND VOCABULARY USED BY THE FRAMERS OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION 860-707 (1991). No. 05-6596 United States v. White Page 20 court must pronounce that judgment, which the law hath annexed to the crime”). Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466, 478-79 (2000); see also id. at 510 (Thomas, J., concurring) (citing a leading treatise on criminal procedure at common law, which stated that “‘the indictment must . . . contain an averment of every particular thing which enters into the punishment’”) (quoting 1 J. BISHOP, LAW OF CRIMINAL PROCEDURE § 80, at 51 (2d ed. 1872)). In other words, it has long been required that all offense-related facts underlying the sentence first be “stated with . . . certainty and precision” in the indictment and then proved beyond a reasonable doubt to the jury. To permit facts rejected by the jury to serve as the basis for the sentence would sever “the invariable linkage of punishment with crime.” Furthermore, we should remember that when Blackstone, quoted above, published his treatise in the 1760s, the English-speaking people had enjoyed the right of trial by jury in criminal cases for more than 500 years, and common law lawyers and judges, from Bracton in 1250 to Lord Coke in 1620 to Blackstone, had come to revere their unique institution of liberty. See 2 BRACTON ON THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF ENGLAND 386-87 (George E. Woodbine ed., Samuel E. Thorne trans., 1968) (explaining, in the thirteenth century, that a criminal defendant “has the power of choosing whether to place himself on a jury or defend himself by his body”). Perhaps it will be contended that the use of acquitted conduct does not violate the right to trial by jury because, in a literal sense, a defendant is still tried by a jury, even when parts of its verdict is ignored during sentencing. The Founders were keenly aware, though, that “the jury right could be lost not only by gross denial, but by erosion.” Jones v. United States, 526 U.S. 227, 248 (1999). Indeed, they recognized the need to be particularly circumspect about such incremental degradations, “‘which, under a variety of plausible pretenses, may in time, imperceptibly undermine this best preservative of LIBERTY.’” Id. at 248-49 (quoting A [New Hampshire] Farmer, No. 3, June 6, 1788, quoted in THE COMPLETE BILL OF RIGHTS 477 (N. Cogan ed.1997)). No. 05-6596 United States v. White Page 21 Allowing the use of acquitted conduct at sentencing also eviscerates the jury’s longstanding power of mitigation, a close relative of the power of jury nullification. As the Supreme Court has noted: The potential or inevitable severity of sentences was indirectly checked by juries’ assertions of a mitigating power when the circumstances of a prosecution pointed to political abuse of the criminal process or endowed a criminal conviction with particularly sanguinary consequences. This power to thwart Parliament and Crown took the form not only of flat-out acquittals in the face of guilt but of what today we would call verdicts of guilty to lesser included offenses, manifestations of what Blackstone described as “pious perjury” on the jurors’ part. Id. at 245 (quoting 4 W. BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND 23839 (1769)). The “power to mitigate or nullify the law in an individual case is no accident. It is part of the constitutional design — and has remained part of that design since the Nation’s founding.” Rachel E. Barkow, Recharging the Jury: The Criminal Jury’s Constitutional Role in an era of Mandatory Sentencing, 152 U. PENN. L. REV. 33, 36 (2003). A jury cannot mitigate the harshness of a sentence it deems excessive if a sentencing judge may use acquitted conduct to sentence the defendant as though he had been convicted of the more severe offense. This common law heritage is reflected in the fact that the overwhelming majority of states do not use acquitted conduct at sentencing.5 Those who have surveyed the state sentencing systems, including Phyllis J. Newton, the previous Staff Director of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and John Steer, recently retired General Counsel and Vice Chair of the Commission, now concede that states have not followed the Commission in allowing acquitted conduct to mechanically ratchet up sentences and that the federal court’s use of acquitted conduct in calculating an advisory sentencing range should be 5 “Although indeterminate sentencing systems typically allow judges to consider prior misconduct when sentencing, many states make an exception for acquitted conduct — conduct that formed the basis of a charge resulting in an acquittal at trial.” NORA V. DEMLEITNER, ET AL., SENTENCING LAW AND POLICY 284 (2d ed. 2007). A handful of states permit the consideration of acquitted conduct at sentencing. See State v. Huey, 505 A.2d 1242 (Conn. 1986); State v. Woodlief, 90 S.E. 137 (N.C. 1916); State v. Leiter, 646 N.W.2d 341 (Wis. 2002). But none goes so far as to require judges to do so, much less to mandate an increased presumptive sentencing range because of acquitted conduct. No. 05-6596 United States v. White Page 22 discontinued.6 See, e.g., Phyllis J. Newton, Building Bridges Between the Federal and State Sentencing Commissions, 8 FED. SENT’G REP. 68, 69 (1995) (arguing that the federal guidelines should be revised by “limiting acquitted conduct to within the guideline range” in light of the fact that “[v]irtually all states, in contrast to the federal system, have adopted an offense of conviction system under which uncharged conduct generally remains outside the parameters of the guidelines”); An Interview with John Steer, CHAMPION, Sept. 2008, at 42 (“The first change I would make . . . is to exclude acquitted conduct from the guideline [1.B1.3]” in part because “the federal guidelines [are] alone among sentencing reform efforts in using acquitted conduct to construct the guideline range”). The American Law Institute and American Bar Association have also joined the ranks of those formally opposed to the use of acquitted conduct at sentencing.7 Thus the states are still basically following the common law limitations on judicial behavior found in the language of the historical documents discussed above, creating a notable conflict within our federal system.8