Opinion ID: 852802
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Judicial Statements About Aggravators

Text: The fourth aggravator was that prior punishments had failed to rehabilitate Morgan. We conclude that such statements, which our Court of Appeals has called derivative of criminal history, are legitimate observations about the weight to be given to facts appropriately noted by a judge alone under Blakely. They cannot serve as separate aggravating circumstances. In response to the holdings in Blakely and Smylie, this Court and the Court of Appeals have received a good many appeals alleging that sentences imposed by this state's trial courts were unconstitutional because they were enhanced beyond the presumptive term by the presence of aggravators not found by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Like Morgan, a number of other appellants challenge the imposition of the sentence in part because the precise language of the aggravator used to enhance the sentence was not submitted to the jury or admitted by the defendant. We conclude instead that in some of these cases the trial court appears to have relied either on facts implicit in the jury's finding, or on facts admitted by the defendant in choosing to articulate a particular aggravator. A good example of this sort of challenge is this case, in which Morgan argues that because she was never specifically questioned regarding, nor specifically admitted to, the fact that previous punishments had failed to rehabilitate the trial court impermissibly found that aggravator. The Court in Booker described the Sixth Amendment right of a criminal defendant to a jury trial, as articulated in Blakely, and suggested that the right is only violated whenever a judge seeks to impose a sentence that is not solely based on `facts reflected in the jury verdict or admitted by the defendant.' Booker, 543 U.S. ___, 125 S.Ct. at 749, 160 L.Ed.2d 621 (emphasis added) (quoting Blakely, 542 U.S. ___, 124 S.Ct. at 2537, 159 L.Ed.2d 403). We do not see how the Sixth Amendment is implicated or endangered by permitting judges to use aggravators to enhance sentences so long as the underlying facts supporting the aggravator are found by a jury or admitted by a defendant. Put another way, Sixth Amendment rights are not implicated when the language of an aggravator is meant to describe the factual circumstances, not to serve as a fact itself. This is certainly the case with an aggravator such as failed to rehabilitate or failed to deter where the language used is not itself a fact. Such observations merely describe the moral or penal weight of actual facts. The fact of being undeterred is not established by a statement to that effect, but rather by the underlying fact of prior convictions. Indeed, Blakely left in tact [sic] the trial judge's authority to determine whether facts alleged and found are sufficiently substantial and compelling to warrant imposing an exceptional sentence.... [T]hat decision is a legal judgment which, unlike factual determinations, can still be made by the trial court. State v. Hughes, 110 P.3d 192, 202 (Wash.2005) (relying in part on Blakely, 124 S.Ct. at 2538 n. 8). The aggravators in such instances are not found by the separate inquiry of a judge, but rather by reference to facts already admitted by the defendant or found by a jury. Thus the use of such underlying facts to support an aggravator does not require the independent judicial fact-finding at issue in Blakely. Rather, it reflects the efforts of a judge to describe in a concise manner what the underlying facts mean, and why they demonstrate that a particular defendant deserves an enhanced sentence. Because the use of underlying facts to support an enhanced sentence does not violate the Sixth Amendment requirements of Blakely by allowing impermissible independent judicial fact finding, we hold that sentences enhanced by aggravators whose language is not specifically found by a jury or admitted by the defendant, are not necessarily impermissible so long as the aggravator in question was 1) supported by facts otherwise admitted or found by a jury and 2) meant as a concise description of what the underlying facts demonstrate and therefore relies upon a legal determination otherwise reserved as a power of the judge.