Supreme Court: Judges alone can't impose extra-long prison terms

[Judi Lynn]

Thursday, June 24, 2004 · Last updated 11:28 a.m. PT

Supreme Court: Judges alone can't impose extra-long prison terms

By ANNE GEARAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- A divided U.S. Supreme Court underscored Thursday that the constitutional right to a jury trial forbids a judge from acting alone to tack additional time onto a convict's sentence.

By a 5-4 vote, the court overturned the sentence of a Washington state man who got more than seven years in prison for kidnapping his estranged wife in 1998. A judge had said the four-year term called for in state sentencing guidelines was too lenient.

The judge said Ralph Howard Blakely acted with "deliberate cruelty" that merited a longer term than Blakely or prosecutors had anticipated.

The right to a jury trial "is no mere procedural formality, but a fundamental reservation of power in our constitutional structure," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for an odd right-left lineup of justices.

Blakely "was sentenced to prison for more than three years beyond what the law allowed for the crime to which he confessed, on the basis of a disputed finding," by the trial judge, Scalia wrote.
(snip/...)

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/aplocal_story.asp?category=6420&slug=Scotus%20Sentences

[trotsky]

1. Wow, what an unusual split.

5: Scalia, Thomas, Ginsburg, Stevens, and Souter
4: Rehnquist, O'Connor, Kennedy, Breyer

[hang a left]

3. I wonder how this applies here.

WASHINGTON - Many get-tough approaches to crime don't work and some, such as mandatory minimum sentences for small-time drug offenders, are unfair and should be abolished, a report from the American Bar Association said Wednesday. Laws requiring mandatory minimum prison terms leave little room to consider differences among crimes and criminals, an ABA commission found in its study of problems in the criminal justice system. More people are behind bars for longer terms, but it is unclear whether the country is safer as a result, the ABA said.

The report and recommendations for changes in sentencing, prison conditions and programs for released prisoners follow criticism of the criminal justice system last year from Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Kennedy asked the nation's largest lawyers' group to look at what he called unfair and even immoral practices throughout the criminal justice system, and he appeared alongside the group's president Wednesday to accept the first copy of the resulting study. "The political phrase `tough on crime' should not lead us into moral blindness," Kennedy said.

Citing his role as a judge, Kennedy did not specifically endorse the report's recommendations, although he has previously denounced mandatory minimum sentences and called for revision of federal sentencing guidelines. In his speech to the ABA last year, Kennedy said existing guidelines give prosecutors too much power and judges too little discretion. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the federal guidelines in 1989, but on Monday a federal judge in Boston seemed to echo Kennedy in ruling that the guidelines are unconstitutional because they weight the system toward prosecutors.

"The focus of our entire criminal justice system has shifted away from trials and juries and adjudication to a massive system of sentence bargaining that is heavily rigged against the accused citizen," U.S. District Judge William G. Young wrote.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=718&e=6&u=/ap...

[patdem]

2. As long as Scalia does not say it only counts in a crime of a man against

a woman and cannot be used as a precident...AKA the bush* vs Gore edict!