The Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment right to jury trial requires that other than a prior conviction, only facts admitted by a defendant or proved beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury may be used to calculate a sentence exceeding the prescribed statutory maximum sentence, whether the defendant has pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial.
The maximum sentence that a judge may impose is based upon the facts admitted by the defendant or proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
[3] In 2003, Freddie Joe Booker was arrested after police officers found 92.5 grams of crack cocaine in his duffel bag.
At sentencing, the judge, by a preponderance of the evidence, determined that Fanfan was responsible for 2.5 kilograms of cocaine powder and 261.6 grams of crack and was an organizer, leader, manager, or supervisor in the criminal activity.
Justice Breyer wrote the majority opinion answering the question of how to remedy the Sixth Amendment violation identified by the Court.
The Government made three principal arguments against applying Blakely to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, all of which the Court rejected.
"Regardless of whether the legal basis of the accusation [against the defendant] is in a statute or in guidelines promulgated by an independent commission, the principles behind the jury trial right are equally applicable" to each.
The Government identified four recent cases that, it argued, precluded the Court from applying Blakely to the Guidelines under the principles of stare decisis.
The Court considered the converse of the Witte rule in United States v. Watts, 519 U.S. 148 (1997), where it held that conduct of which the defendant had been acquitted could nevertheless support a sentence enhancement under the Guidelines.
In Edwards, the defendants could not have argued that the powder and crack cocaine were not part of the same overall conspiracy; hence, the Court's ruling in that case was not inconsistent with applying Blakely to the Guidelines.
The United States Sentencing Commission was not performing an adjudicatory function; rather, it was exercising a policy-making power appropriate for judicial officers and uniquely within their expertise.
The first option, and the one preferred by the Justices who dissented from the remedial holding, "would engraft onto the existing system today's Sixth Amendment 'jury trial' requirement."
Second, "Congress's basic statutory goal — a system that diminishes sentencing disparity — depends for its success upon judicial efforts to determine, and to base punishment upon, the real conduct that underlies the crime of conviction."
Judges typically relied on presentence reports, which set forth the relevant conduct and offender characteristics, to assist them in determining what an appropriate sentence was.
Congress anticipated that, under the Guidelines, this practice would continue, and this expectation supported the Court's holdings in Witte and Watts.
If the jury factfinding requirement were merely grafted onto the Guidelines scheme, unless prosecutors "decide to charge more than the elements of the crime," the judge would have to impose similar punishments.
Instead, it would complicate them by increasing the likelihood that any agreed-upon sentence reflects more the skill of defense counsel and the prosecutor's policies than the real conduct underlying the offense.
For all these reasons, the Court concluded that Congress would not have enacted the Guidelines as it did if it had known that many of the various sentence-enhancing factors would be subject to a jury-trial requirement.
It required district judges to "consider" the Guidelines sentencing range established for the applicable category of offense committed by the applicable category of defendant in order to impose a sentence that reflects the seriousness of the offense, promotes respect for the law, provides for adequate deterrence, protects the public, and provides the defendant with needed educational or vocational training or medical care.
This did not impose an unnecessary obstacle for handling appeals of sentences, for "a statute that does not explicitly set forth a standard of review may do so implicitly."
Justice Stevens pointed out that it was possible to avoid the Sixth Amendment violation in Booker's case without making any changes to the Guidelines at all.
He started with the premise that all legislative enactments are presumed to be valid, and may only be struck down in their entirety if the law is unconstitutional in "all or nearly all of its applications," or if the invalid provision cannot be severed from the remainder of the statute.
Neither of those conditions applied to the federal sentencing laws, Stevens observed, and so there was no need to adopt a third method of curing constitutional violations.
These two observations led Stevens to the conclusion that only a "tiny portion" of criminal sentences imposed under the mandatory Guidelines scheme would actually implicate the Blakely rule.
Indeed, after Blakely was decided, the Department of Justice instructed prosecutors to include drug quantity allegations in the indictment.
Congress must presumably legislate within constitutional limitations, after all, and it was not plain from the language of the statute that this alternative interpretation was incompatible.
Stevens disputed that applying Blakely to the Guidelines would frustrate the goal of achieving uniformity in sentences based on real conduct, because judges retained discretion to impose sentences within prescribed ranges; if defendants pleaded guilty and waived their Blakely rights, the range within which the judge could exercise his discretion would necessarily increase.
To the extent prosecutors overstep their charging authority, judges retain the ability to reject unsatisfactory plea agreements.
Justice Breyer reiterated his disagreement with the Apprendi rule, and then identified specific reasons not to apply the Blakely holding to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.
Second, under the majority's holding that standard would apply across the board to all sentence appeals, including those that involved no legal error.