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

Heading: Offense/Offender Distinction

Text: To ensure that such unconstitutional sentences are not imposed in the future, district courts should calculate the applicable Guidelines range by relying only on facts, other than a prior conviction, that have been found by a jury or admitted by the defendant. However, I recognize the value of some judicial factfinding — with indeterminate, non-mathematical consequences — for the purpose of creating individually tailored sentences. Therefore, I conclude that our Court, and federal courts No. 05-6596 United States v. White Page 16 generally, should follow the “offense/offender” distinction offered by Justices Kennedy and Breyer in their separate opinion in Cunningham v. California, 549 U.S. 276, 296-97 (2007) (Kennedy, J., dissenting), a solution suggested in a law review article cited in their opinion, Douglas A. Berman & Stephanos Bibas, Making Sentencing Sensible, 4 OHIO ST. J. CRIM. L. 37, 55-58 (2006). In short, offense conduct must be defined by the defendant’s admissions and the jury’s verdict. Offender characteristics, on the other hand, may be found by a judge. By attaching the jury-trial right to crimes, rather than to any and all decisions related to the accused, the constitutional text suggests a basis for the distinction between offense conduct and offender characteristics. See Douglas A. Berman, Conceptualizing Blakely, 17 FED. SENT’G REP. 89, 89 (2004). The distinction also reinforces “the distinctive institutional competencies of juries and judges, and the distinctive judicial ambit of trial and sentencings.” Id. In their dissent in Cunningham, Justices Kennedy and Breyer suggest that, for “factors exhibited by the defendant,” a “judicial determination” is appropriate. But they do not make it clear that the judicial process with regard to offender characteristics or “factors” should be an indeterminate one, in which a particular fact would not trigger a specific, mathematical increase or decrease in the sentence. In a footnote, the majority in Cunningham questions the validity of what it sees as particularized, determinate judicial factfinding on the offender side of the offense/offender divide. See 549 U.S. at 291 n.14. But determinate, fixed judicial factfinding on offender characteristics is not a necessary part of the concept advanced by Justices Kennedy and Breyer. The law review article that they acknowledge as the source of their opinion explains that on offender characteristics issues the judge should not find facts by engaging in determinate sentencing but should follow the constitutionally valid, indeterminate sentencing system of the Williams era, “when the rehabilitative ideal held sway”: In other words, whenever offense facts have fixed and predictable sentencing consequences, then the jury, as the preferred fact-finder, must pass on them. Judges remain authorized, however, to consider a range of facts as part of exercising reasoned judgment at sentencing. No. 05-6596 United States v. White Page 17 Berman & Bibas, supra, at 58 (relying on Williams v. New York, 337 U.S. 241, 251 (1949), which states that an indeterminate sentencing system that takes rehabilitation and specific deterrence goals seriously enables judges to exercise “their judgment” without violating the Constitution). The law professors conclude their article as follows: The modest vision of constitutional sentencing law set forth would preserve the jury’s core function. At the same time, it would leave healthy room for other actors and jurisdictions to experiment and find workable solutions. Reasoned sentencing opinions would over time develop into a common law of sentencing, as diverse judges articulated consensus views about which factors should matter. Reasoned opinions would be more transparent than federal mathematical mumbo-jumbo. Id. at 71. A rule foreclosing the judicial determination of offense conduct does not necessarily mean that the trial judges in sentencing must forget the evidence they heard at the jury trial. On the offender characteristics side of the divide, sentencing judges may consider all that they have heard when it comes to Williams-era-style, indeterminate assessments of defendants’ prospects for rehabilitation, risk of future harmful conduct, and other similar considerations. In this case, however, it is clear that the sentencing judge erred in assessing a fixed, determinate, 14-year sentence enhancement based on judge-found offense conduct. The sentence must, therefore, be reversed.