Opinion ID: 852836
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: What Is the Effect of this Blakely Violation?

Text: The foregoing conclusion about the unconstitutionality of Indiana's present sentencing system hardly nullifies the entire arrangement. We have historically rescued constitutional portions of statutes, if possible, when other portions are held unconstitutional. See, e.g., State v. Barker, 809 N.E.2d 312 (Ind.2004); State v. Kuebel, 241 Ind. 268, 172 N.E.2d 45 (1961). We have adopted the severability test enunciated in Dorchy v. Kansas: A statute bad in part is not necessarily void in its entirety. Provisions within the legislative power may stand if separable from the bad. But a provision, inherently unobjectionable, cannot be deemed separable unless it appears both that, standing alone, legal effect can be given to it and that the legislature intended the provision to stand, in case others included in the act and held bad should fall. [7] It is apparent that Indiana's sentencing system runs afoul of the Sixth Amendment not because it mandates a fixed term sentence for each felony, but because it mandates both a fixed term and permits judicial discretion in finding aggravating or mitigating circumstances to deviate from the fixed term. A constitutional scheme akin to ours could take one of two forms: (1) our present arrangement of fixed presumptive terms, modified to require jury findings on facts in aggravation, or (2) a system in which there is no stated fixed term (or at least none that has legally binding effect) in which judges would impose sentences without a jury. The U.S. Supreme Court, in its most recent installment in this Sixth Amendment saga, applied Blakely to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. ___, 125 S.Ct. 738, 746, 160 L.Ed.2d 621 (2005). The Court's solution was to sever and excise a portion of the sentencing statute that made the sentence indicated by the Guidelines range mandatory unless the trial court found aggravating or mitigating circumstances not adequately considered by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. This excising produced an arrangement like the second option described above. Blakely had explicitly sanctioned such regimes. Blakely, 542 U.S. at ___, 124 S.Ct. at 2540 (indeterminate sentencing by judges and parole boards not a violation of Sixth Amendment). Our conclusion about severability leads to an outcome more like the first choice mentioned above. In excising only the minimal portions of the existing statute necessary to comply with Blakely, we are much influenced by the fact that the overarching theme of Indiana's 1977 sentencing reform was a legislative decision to abandon indeterminate sentencing in favor of fixed and predictable penalties. The 1977 act assigned to judges the task of imposing penalties stated as a fixed term of years and created a structure for setting those penalties that is far more definitive than the scheme it replaced. We conclude that the first option listed above is probably more faithful to the large objectives of the General Assembly's 1977 decisions. We thus hold that the sort of facts envisioned by Blakely as necessitating a jury finding must be found by a jury under Indiana's existing sentencing laws.