Court Opinion

ID: 9860002
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 23:06:37.266957+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:11:05.890308
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE FREEMAN, specially concurring: I agree with the majority’s conclusion that Apprendi claims are susceptible to harmless error analysis. I cannot fully join the majority because I do not believe that Neder and Apprendi are fundamentally at odds, a point on which the majority appears — at least to some extent — to agree with the dissent. I write separately to briefly set out the shortcomings in the argument presented by the dissent and to clarify why Apprendi and Neder are not in conflict. First, it is clear that Apprendi did not directly overrule Neder. Apprendi did not even mention Neder. In fact, Apprendi did not even mention the phrase “harmless error.” Moreover, Apprendi explicitly rejected the suggestion from the decision on review that there was “ ‘rarely any doubt’ ” regarding the fact proof of which was required by the statute under review. Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 475, 147 L. Ed. 2d at 446, 120 S. Ct. at 2354-55, quoting State v. Apprendi, 159 N.J. Super. 7, 25, 731 A.2d 485, 495 (1999). In so doing, the Court removed any question of harmless error in the case. Because the Supreme Court has not explicitly overruled Neder, we must proceed on the assumption that case remains good law. For even if Apprendi could be read as implicitly overruling Neder — which it cannot, as I shall explain shortly — the Supreme Court has stated: “We do not acknowledge, and we do not hold, that other courts should conclude our more recent cases have, by implication, overruled an earlier precedent. We reaffirm that ‘[i]f a precedent of this Court has direct application in a case, yet appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other line of decisions, the Court of Appeals should follow the case which directly controls, leaving to this Court the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.’ [Citation.]” (Emphasis added.) Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203, 237, 138 L. Ed. 2d 391, 423, 117 S. Ct. 1997, 2017 (1997). Thus, the error of the dissent’s conclusion is clear. And in any event, Apprendi and Neder are not in conflict, such that Apprendi could reasonably be said to have overruled the earlier case. The majority and the dissent both question how Neder and Apprendi can be reconciled. The bases for this concern are the statements in Apprendi that “constitutional protections of surpassing importance” were at stake in the case (Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 476, 147 L. Ed. 2d at 447, 120 S. Ct. at 2355), and the quote which is generally cited as the holding of that case: “Other 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.” Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 490, 147 L. Ed. 2d at 455, 120 S. Ct. at 2362-63. How, my colleagues question, can an Apprendi violation be harmless when the Supreme Court explicitly stated that proof of certain facts beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury is required by “constitutional protections of surpassing importance”? First, the Court immediately names the “constitutional protections” to which it is referring: the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment and the sixth amendment jury trial guarantee. Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 476, 147 L. Ed. 2d at 447, 120 S. Ct. at 2355. It is from these sources that the Court derives its conclusion that the facts undergirding the sentencing range must be proven to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Thus, I submit, what the Court has truly held in Apprendi is simply that the sixth amendment jury trial guarantee— made applicable to the states through the due process clause — extends to those facts necessary to establish the precise sentencing range within which the defendant’s sentence falls. The above quote — “Other 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” (Apprendi, 530 U.S. at 490, 147 L. Ed. 2d at 455, 120 S. Ct. at 2362-63) — is implicitly preceded by the phrase “The Sixth Amendment requires that.” The entirety of Apprendi is interpretation and application of the sixth amendment. Thus, Apprendi cannot fairly be read as implicitly overruling Neder, because the two cases are talking about related, but distinct, questions. The only subject under consideration in Apprendi is: To what facts does the sixth amendment jury trial right extend? By contrast, the question in Neder is: In the context of facts to which we know the sixth amendment jury trial right applies, can a violation of that right be harmless error? In other words, the questions addressed in the cases relate to different steps in the analysis of a defendant’s claim that his sixth amendment rights were violated because a particular fact or facts were not proven to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Apprendi relates to a threshold question in such a claim: Is the fact in question one to which the sixth amendment right attaches? If so, and if that fact was indeed not proven to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt, then there is a sixth amendment violation. Neder relates to a subsequent step: Given a violation of the sixth amendment jury trial right, can such a constitutional violation be harmless? Succinctly, Apprendi deals with the scope of the sixth amendment jury trial right, while Neder deals with the effect of a violation of that right. Although both cases involve the sixth amendment, I respectfully suggest that there is no overlap between their subject matter. Apprendi violations are susceptible to harmless error review, in my reading of the cases, because what we label an “Apprendi violation” is simply a specific type of violation of the sixth amendment jury trial guarantee — a violation with respect to facts establishing the applicable sentence. Neder has already held, however, that all violations of the sixth amendment jury trial guarantee are susceptible to harmless error review. In the end, perhaps all my colleagues in the majority are saying is that it seems, for lack of a better word, peculiar for the Court to have labeled the sixth amendment jury trial guarantee one of “surpassing importance,” in Apprendi, shortly after having held that a violation thereof is susceptible to harmless error review, in Neder. In such an observation I would concur. However, the cases are not in conflict. Whatever one’s personal opinion might be with respect to the correctness of the Court’s decision in Neder — a 5-4 decision with very strong dissents — neither Apprendi nor any other case has overruled it. So long as it remains the law of the land we are bound to follow it, unless we determine that there is a reason to depart lockstep and find that the Illinois constitution provides greater protection than the federal.