Opinion ID: 2974297
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The District Court Misread Apprendi

Text: The district’s court reliance on Apprendi to grant the writ was misplaced. The district court’s conclusion that the indictment must expressly present every element of the offense in a state prosecution is founded on the conclusion that Apprendi’s single reference to an indictment, without any further discussion, sub silentio overturned the longstanding precedent that the Fifth Amendment Grand Jury Clause, which guarantees indictment by a grand jury in federal prosecutions, U.S. CONST. amend. V; Stirone v. United States, 361 U.S. 212 (1960), was not incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment to apply to the states. See Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 687-88 n.25 (1972) (noting that “indictment by grand jury is not part of the due process of law guaranteed to state criminal defendants by the Fourteenth Amendment”); Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516, 535 (1884) (holding that the Fourteenth Amendment did not incorporate the Fifth Amendment right to a grand jury). The district court’s conclusion that Apprendi requires that state prosecutions must employ indictments listing all elements of a crime necessarily implies that states must employ grand 2 Presumably the district court was referring to the grand jury rather than the petit jury, although the district court’s simultaneous reliance on the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial confuses this issue, as discussed below. No. 05-3986 Williams v. Haviland Page 4 juries to return indictments. This conclusion runs contrary to the Supreme Court’s repeated assertion that the Grand Jury Clause of the Fifth Amendment does not apply to the states, Rose, 443 U.S. at 557 n.7; Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U.S. 103, 118–19 (1975); Branzburg, 408 U.S. at 687-88 n.25; Alexander v. Louisiana, 405 U.S. 625, 633 (1972); Beck v. Washington, 369 U.S. 541, 545 (1962); Gaines v. Washington, 277 U.S. 81, 86 (1928); Lem Woon v. Oregon, 229 U.S. 586, 590 (1913), a principle of law “so well established that its overruling would constitute a result so ‘novel’ that a counsel’s failure to ask for the overruling in prior proceedings would not constitute a procedural default for the purposes of habeas review.” WAYNE R. LAFAVE, JEROLD H. ISRAEL & NANCY J. KING, 4 CRIM. PROC. § 15.1 n.141 (2d ed. 1999) (citing Reed v. Ross, 468 U.S. 1 (1984)). The Court could not have intended to refashion such a settled principle of law by the mere mention of an indictment in Apprendi. In fact, Apprendi itself forecloses the district court’s reading of that case. As the Supreme Court stated, the question before it in Apprendi was “whether the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that a factual determination authorizing an increase in the maximum prison sentence for an offense from 10 to 20 years be made by a jury on the basis of proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” 530 U.S. at 469, not the constitutional parameters of the language of an indictment in a state prosecution. Immediately preceding the quotation from Apprendi on which the district court relied, the Court explained that [t]he question whether Apprendi had a constitutional right to have a jury find such bias on the basis of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is starkly presented. . . . Our answer to that question was foreshadowed by our opinion in Jones v. United States, 526 U.S. 227 (1999), construing a federal statute. We there noted that “under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the notice and jury trial guarantees of the Sixth Amendment, any fact (other than prior conviction) that increases the maximum penalty for a crime must be charged in an indictment, submitted to a jury, and proven beyond a reasonable doubt.” Id. at 243 n.6. The Fourteenth Amendment commands the same answer in this case involving a state statute. 530 U.S. at 475-76 (emphasis added). Therefore, contrary to the district court’s assertion, Apprendi did not hold that “any fact (other than prior conviction) that increases the maximum penalty for a crime must be charged in an indictment, submitted to a jury, and proven beyond a reasonable doubt.” Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 476. Rather, this is the holding of Jones, a case involving a federal prosecution, to which the Fifth Amendment Grand Jury Clause clearly applies. See United States v. Cotton, 535 U.S. 625, 627 (2002). Apprendi relied on Jones to hold that “[o]ther than the fact of a prior conviction, any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury.” 530 U.S. at 490. The Apprendi holding does not mention any requirements related to the indictment. Id. If there were any doubt as to the scope of Apprendi, a footnote therein makes clear beyond peradventure that the opinion did not extend the Fifth Amendment grand jury right to state prosecutions. See id. at 477 n.3. The Court stated that Apprendi has not here asserted a constitutional claim based on the omission of any reference to sentence enhancement or racial bias in the indictment. He relies entirely on the fact that the “due process of law” that the Fourteenth Amendment requires the States to provide to persons accused of crime encompasses the right to a trial by jury, Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145 (1968), and the right to have every element of the offense proved beyond a reasonable doubt, In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358 (1970). That Amendment has not, however, been construed to include the Fifth Amendment right to “presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury” that was implicated in our recent decision in Almendarez-Torres v. United States, 523 U.S. 224 (1998). We thus do not address the indictment question separately today. No. 05-3986 Williams v. Haviland Page 5 Id. (emphases added). Given this explicit admonition that Apprendi does not address the issue of the requirements for indictments in state prosecutions, the district court’s reading of Apprendi holds no water. The Supreme Court cases following Apprendi ratify this reading of Apprendi’s scope — that it did not extend the Fifth Amendment right to a grand jury indictment to state prosecutions. The Court has repeatedly described the holding of Apprendi without reference to any indictment requirements, instead explaining that Apprendi “held that the Sixth Amendment does not permit a defendant to be ‘expose[d] . . . to a penalty exceeding the maximum he would receive if punished according to the facts reflected in the jury verdict alone.’” Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584, 588-89 (2002) (quoting Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 483) (omission in original); accord United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220, 231 (2005); Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296, 301 (2004); Schriro v. Summerlin, 542 U.S. 348, 350 (2004). In Cotton, the Court stated that Apprendi “held that ‘[o]ther than the fact of prior conviction, any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt.’” 535 U.S. at 627 (quoting Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 490). Without missing a beat, the Court then stated that “[i]n federal prosecutions, such facts must also be charged in the indictment.” Id. (emphasis added). By explicitly referring to federal prosecutions and distinguishing state prosecutions, Cotton makes clear that Apprendi did not revisit the well-established rule that the states are not bound by the Fifth Amendment grand jury right. After Apprendi, the Supreme Court has only referred to the Apprendi quotation relied on by the district court in discussing the holding of Jones. See Ring, 536 U.S. at 600; Harris v. United States, 536 U.S. 545, 555 (2002). The district court’s reliance on Apprendi also cannot be sustained in light of our prior precedent, United States v. Lentsch, 369 F.3d 948 (6th Cir. 2004), which further confirms the limited reading of Apprendi. In that case, the defendants, who were prosecuted for trespassing in violation of federal law, claimed that the indictment did not sufficiently charge them with one of the elements of the federal trespassing statute. Id. at 951-52. The defendants argued that the alleged deficiency in the indictment should be analyzed under Apprendi’s statement that “any fact (other than prior conviction) that increases the maximum penalty for a crime must be charged in an indictment, submitted to a jury, and proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 476. We rejected that argument, explaining that [a]lthough the Supreme Court in Apprendi did comment incidentally that any fact — other than a prior conviction — must be charged in an indictment, [530 U.S.] at 476, it specifically cautioned that Apprendi had not claimed a constitutional violation based on the indictment’s failure to specify a fact that could subject him to an increased sentence. Id. at 477 n.3. Instead, Apprendi clarified that, “[o]ther than the fact of a prior conviction, any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury and proved beyond a reasonable doubt.” Id. at 490 (emphasis added). Lentsch, 369 F.3d at 952 n.5. In addition to observing the boundaries of the Apprendi opinion’s reach demarcated in that opinion itself, we are bound to adhere to our prior reading of the scope of the opinion: that Apprendi does not address the issue of insufficient indictments. See Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 490; Lentsch, 369 F.3d at 952 n.5; Maples, 340 F.3d at 437 (noting that a prior opinion of this court is binding on a later panel). The district court’s invocation of the Sixth Amendment jury trial right cannot cure the defects in its opinion and merely obscures the controlling law in this case: that there is no constitutional right in a state prosecution to a grand jury indictment with particular specificity. See, e.g., Cotton, 535 U.S. at 627; Rose, 443 U.S. at 557 n.7. The Sixth Amendment right announced in Apprendi addresses a defendant’s right to have a petit jury determine each essential element of the No. 05-3986 Williams v. Haviland Page 6 crime, and does not pertain to any rights the defendant has vis-a-vis the grand jury proceedings. See Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 477 n.3, 490 (holding only that “[o]ther than the fact of a prior conviction, any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt”). Even if Williams is correct that one of the purposes of a state’s charging instrument, should it choose to utilize one, is to notify the grand jury of what it must find, this is still not a constitutional right grounded in the Sixth Amendment, which controls what facts the petit jury must find. It is the jury instructions, and not the indictment, that provide notice to the petit jury of the requirements for conviction. DANIEL R. COQUILLETTE, GREGORY P. JOSEPH, SOL SCHREIBER, JEROLD SOLOVY & GEORGENE M. VAIRO, MOORE’S FEDERAL PRACTICE — CRIMINAL § 630.02 (3d ed. 1997) (explaining that to allow the jury “to decide the question of the defendant’s guilt or innocence in accordance with Constitutional principles,” the jury instructions “must accurately define the essential elements of the offense charged”). Neither can the district court’s discussion of the role of the grand jury lend support for its approach, because the cases it cites address federal prosecutions, see Williams, 2005 WL 1566762, at  (citing United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 343 (1974); United States v. Nieves, 108 F. App’x 790, 792 (4th Cir. 2004); United States v. Bruce, 394 F.3d 1215, 1230 (9th Cir. 2005); United States v. Olson, 262 F.3d 795, 799 (8th Cir. 2001)), and the role of the indictment and the grand jury in federal prosecutions is undisputed in this case.3