US Supreme Court rules against California Sentencing Rules

[ISiddiqui]

I tend to agree with the majority here. Sentencing should be something a jury does, not where a judge can tack on more years if he feels like it. Though the thing that really interested me was the combination of justices on either side:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/wa...rtner=homepage

January 22, 2007

Court Rules Against Sentencing Rules in Calif.

By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 -- The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 today that California’s system of sentencing criminals is unconstitutional because it gives judges some authority that really belongs to jurors and thus deprives a defendant of a fair trial.

In a decision that could affect thousands of California prisoners, the justices said the 16-year sentence imposed on John Cunningham, who was convicted in Contra Costa County of sexually abusing his young son, was improper. The decision effectively cuts four years off Mr. Cunningham’s sentence.

The problem, according to the justices in the majority, was that the trial judge, acting under California’s determinate-sentencing law, had increased Mr. Cunningham’s sentence from the 12-year “middle” range specified in the law to the 16-year “upper” range. The judge did so after finding several aggravating or unfavorable facts about the case, including the age and vulnerability of the victim, and a single mitigating factor, that the defendant had no prior record.

The system under which the trial judge acted was also flawed, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority. “Fact-finding to elevate a sentence from 12 to 16 years,” she wrote, “falls within the province of the jury employing a beyond-a-reasonable doubt standard, not the bailiwick of a judge determining where the preponderance of the evidence lies.”

Today’s ruling, which had been eagerly anticipated by defense lawyers and by corrections officials in several other states, was the latest in a series of decisions in recent years in which the high court has held that juries, not judges, must find additional facts that justify higher sentences.

The difference between the “beyond-a-reasonable doubt” standard, which a jury is supposed to follow in finding that a defendant is, in fact, guilty and the “preponderance of evidence” standard is crucial.

The first means “fully satisfied, entirely convinced, satisfied to a moral certainty,” while the second and lesser standard means “evidence which is of greater weight or more convincing” than evidence offered against it, according to Black’s Law Dictionary.

When the case was argued before the justices on Oct. 11, Mr. Cunningham’s lawyer, Peter Gold of San Francisco, argued that the four years tacked on to his client’s sentence violated his Sixth Amendment right to trial and his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.

Lawyers for the state argued, unsuccessfully, that the judge was authorized to choose from a lower, middle or higher range of sentence — six, 12 or 16 years — based on the jury verdict.

Joining Justice Ginsburg’s majority decision today were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, David H. Souter and Clarence Thomas Dissenting were Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

“Judges and legislators must have the capacity to develop consistent standards, standards that individual juries empaneled for only a short time cannot elaborate in any permanent way,” Justice Kennedy wrote.

Justice Kennedy, who was joined by Justice Alito, said today’s majority ruling continued the unfortunate trend outlined by the earlier opinions restricting judges’ discretion. “Judges and sentencing officials have a broad view and long-term commitment to correctional systems,” he wrote. “Juries do not.”

Justice Alito, in a separate dissent joined by Justices Kennedy and Breyer, wrote that, contrary to the majority’s findings, the California system “is not meaningfully different” from a federal sentencing procedure upheld by the high court in an earlier case.

[cartman]

Damn activists judges.

Just needed to get that out of the way as soon as possible.

[RedKingGold]

Interesting stuff considering we just covered sentencing in Crim Law.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Just off the top of my head here, although this certainly works out well for the specific appealing party, I'm thinking this might backfire on the lighter sentence desires of some.

Seems to me that this provides another weight in favor of mandatory sentences, which can be used to remove juries from the process.

[cartman]

I think the decision will just make California change the law so that judges can only modify the sentence based on the same level of evidence that the jury uses. It seems to me that the Supreme Court's biggest beef with this particular decision was that the judge used a lower threshold of evidence than the jury in making his decision.

[larrymcg421]

Thsi is not surprising at all. It's basically the same decision as Ring v. Arizona, which Scalia was also in the majority. Scalia may a conservative, but he's a small government, liberty conservative.

[ISiddiqui]

Originally Posted by cartman

I think the decision will just make California change the law so that judges can only modify the sentence based on the same level of evidence that the jury uses. It seems to me that the Supreme Court's biggest beef with this particular decision was that the judge used a lower threshold of evidence than the jury in making his decision.

Have to read the rest of the opinion, but I'm not sure that's the case. It seems Ginsburg is saying that beyond a reasonable doubt is required, but also that judge engaged in 'fact finding' in increasing the sentance, which is something reserved to the jury.

[albionmoonlight]

For those interested:

http://sentencing.typepad.com/ (THE Blog for Federal Sentencing Issues)

RELEVANT PRECEDENTS (IN ORDER):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprendi_versus_New_Jersey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_v._Arizona

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blakely_v._Washington

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Booker (Warning: Mind Fuck)

This is probably one of the few issues on which I am qualified to speak. A fair chunk of what I have been doing over the last two and a half years has been dealing with these cases and their implications.

When/if I get a bit of free time, maybe I'll lay out in layman's terms the state of sentencing law as it relates to the 6th Amendment.