Opinion ID: 2977371
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: As-Applied Violations

Text: Over the past decade, the Supreme Court has begun the process of bringing sentencing guidelines, state and federal, into line with the Sixth Amendment and Article III, § 2 and our common law heritage. In Apprendi v. New Jersey, the Supreme Court established that, under the Sixth Amendment, “[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.” 530 U.S. 466, 490 (2000). In Blakely v. Washington, the Court went further, clarifying that “the ‘statutory maximum’ for Apprendi purposes is the maximum sentence a judge may impose solely on the basis of the facts reflected in the jury verdict or admitted by the defendant.” 542 U.S. 296, 303 (2004). That is, “the maximum [a judge] may impose without any additional findings.” Id. at 304 (emphasis in original). More recent cases have reiterated the same point. In Cunningham v. California, for example, the Supreme Court said: “If the jury’s verdict alone does not authorize the sentence, if, instead, the judge must find an additional fact to impose the longer term, the Sixth Amendment requirement is not satisfied.” 127 S. Ct. 856, 869 (2007). In United States v. Booker, the Court applied the Apprendi-Blakely framework to the United States Sentencing Guidelines and determined that the section of the Sentencing Reform Act that made the Guidelines mandatory violated the Sixth Amendment and needed to be excised. 543 U.S. 220, 258-65 (2005). The Court said in Booker: “More important than the language used in our holding in Apprendi are the principles we sought to vindicate. . . . They are not the product of recent innovations in our jurisprudence, but rather have their genesis in the ideals our constitutional tradition assimilated from the common law.” Id. at 238. This language echoed the reasoning of Blakely: Our commitment to Apprendi in this context reflects not just respect for longstanding precedent, but the need to give intelligible content to the right to jury trial. That right is no mere procedural formality, but a No. 05-6596 United States v. White Page 14 fundamental reservation of power in our constitutional structure. Just as suffrage ensures the people’s ultimate control in the legislative and executive branches, jury trial is meant to ensure their control in the judiciary. 524 U.S. at 305-06. Whether the Court’s solution in Booker actually resolved the Sixth Amendment problem posed by the Sentencing Guidelines is debatable.1 But it is clear that the postBooker development of reasonableness review has opened the door for Sixth Amendment challenges to sentences within the statutory range authorized by the jury’s verdict. In their concurring opinion in Rita v. United States, Justices Scalia and Thomas explained how substantive-reasonableness review would inevitably produce sentences whose legitimacy turns on the existence of certain facts, which, under the Sixth Amendment, must be found by a jury or admitted by the defendant. 127 S. Ct. 2456, 2477 (2007) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment). They illustrate the point with the following hypothetical: [T]he base offense level for robbery under the Guidelines is 20, which, if the defendant has a criminal history of I, corresponds to an advisory range of 33-41 months. If, however, a judge finds that a firearm was discharged, that a victim incurred serious bodily injury, and that more than $5 million was stolen, then the base level jumps by 18, producing an advisory range of 235-293 months. When a judge finds all of those facts to be true and then imposes a within-Guidelines sentence of 293 months, those judge-found facts, or some combination of them, are not merely facts that the judge finds relevant in exercising his discretion; they are the legally essential predicate for his imposition of the 293month sentence. His failure to find them would render the 293-month sentence unlawful. That is evident because, were the district judge explicitly to find none of those facts true and nevertheless to impose a 293-month sentence (simply because he thinks robbery merits seven times the sentence that the Guidelines provide) the sentence would surely be reversed as unreasonably excessive. 1 See, e.g., Michael W. McConnell, The Booker Mess, 83 DEN. U. L. REV. 665, 677 (2006) (“The most striking feature of the Booker decision is that the remedy bears no logical relation to the constitutional violation.”); Douglas A. Berman, Conceptualizing Booker, 38 ARIZ. ST. L.J. 387, 387 (2006) (“Read independently, each majority opinion in Booker seems conceptually muddled; read together, the two Booker rulings seem almost conceptually nonsensical.”). No. 05-6596 United States v. White Page 15 Id. Thus, “for every given crime there is some maximum sentence that will be upheld as reasonable based only on the facts found by the jury or admitted by the defendant,” from which it follows that “[e]very sentence higher than that is legally authorized only by some judge-found fact,” a sentencing process that is unlawful because all facts needed to authorize a sentence “must be found by the jury beyond a reasonable doubt in order ‘to give intelligible content to the right of jury trial.’” Id. (quoting in part Blakely, 542 U.S. at 305). The majority in Rita avoided this point as a mere hypothetical that did not need to be addressed at the time. See id. at 2466 (majority opinion). But the case at hand raises this very issue, and we must address it now. White’s sentence is arguably even more problematic than the sentence in the hypothetical because the jury actually acquitted White of the conduct that led to more than half of his sentence, but the Sixth Amendment violation is identical. White’s 22-year sentence is made possible only by reference to judge-found facts about the discharge of firearms during the crime. Absent those facts, the recommended Guidelines range would be 78 to 97 months. Against that backdrop, a 264-month sentence would certainly be reversed as unreasonable. As such, those judge-found facts are necessary for the lawful imposition of the sentence, thus violating the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial: “[E]xcessive sentences within the statutory range, and the ability of appellate courts to reverse such sentences, inexorably produces, in violation of the Sixth Amendment, sentences whose legality is premised on a judge’s finding some fact (or combination of facts) by a preponderance of the evidence,” id. at 2476. Therefore, White’s sentence must be reversed.