Supreme Court Limits Apprendi; Scalia Hits ‘Strange Exception’
In a 5-4 opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to extend a 2000 decision to bar judges from determining facts when deciding whether sentences should run consecutively.
The court ruled today that the Sixth Amendment does not require juries, rather than judges, to find the facts for consecutive sentencing decisions, SCOTUSblog reports.
The decision (PDF) in Oregon v. Ice reinstated a lengthy prison term for a child molester, the Associated Press reports.
The ruling had liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg supporting prosecutors and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia supporting the defendant’s Sixth Amendment argument. Scalia has been an ardent supporter of Apprendi v. New Jersey, the 2000 opinion at issue in Oregon. Apprendi held that a defendant’s sentence cannot ordinarily be increased beyond the statutory maximum without a finding of fact by a jury.
Ginsburg wrote today’s majority decision. She said respect for state sovereignty and historical practice suggest the rationale of Apprendi should be limited to require jury fact-finding for sentence determinations for “discrete crimes” rather than for the total sentence, according to the SCOTUSblog account.
Scalia wrote for the dissenters. “I cannot understand why we would make such a strange exception to the treasured right of trial by jury,” he said. Scalia complains that the majority relies on “a distinction without a difference” and exhumes “arguments dead and buried.”
“Today’s opinion muddies the waters, and gives cause to doubt whether the court is willing to stand by Apprendi’s interpretation of the Sixth Amendment’s jury-trial guarantee,” he says.
