Court Opinion

ID: 9493740
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:17:40.983262+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:00.550021
License: Public Domain

MERRITT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I write to point out the injustice inherent in sentencing a defendant charged with second degree murder using the first degree murder guidelines. Perhaps this sentencing decision is consistent with the letter of Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466, 120 S.Ct. 2348, 147 L.Ed.2d 435 (2000), because it does not sentence the defendants to terms of imprisonment in excess of the statutory maximum, nor does it alter the range of penalties to which the defendants are exposed. But both the holding in Poindexter and the fundamental basis of our decision in the instant case are clearly contrary to the spirit of Apprendi, which says that factual issues having a significant impact on the defendant’s sentence should be charged in the indictment and proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. The Apprendi approach seems to me to disfavor the current judicial and prosecutorial practice of not giving notice by indictment of the real crime at issue and of leaving most of the more salient factual disputes for the sentencing hearing, where the burden of proof is the less rigorous “preponderance of the evidence” standard and the hearsay rules do not apply. Following the logic of Apprendi, the government should not have been able to cure its charging error simply by convincing a judge outside the normal rules of evidence that the preponderance of the evidence indicated that Harris and Gaines committed first degree murder. This is consistent with my longstanding belief that the Sentencing Guidelines — as interpreted in *780Poindexter and our previous cases — violate the Due Process Clause. See, e.g., United States v. Davern, 970 F.2d 1490, 1500 (6th Cir.1992) (en banc) (Merritt, C.J., dissenting).