Jones V. United States (1999) - Majority Opinion

Majority Opinion

The federal carjacking statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2119, reads:

Whoever, possessing a firearm as defined in section 921 of, takes a motor vehicle that has been transported, shipped, or received in interstate or foreign commerce from the person or presence of another by force and violence or by intimidation, or attempts to do so, shall—

1. be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both,
2. if serious bodily injury (as defined in section 1365 of ) results, be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 25 years, or both, and
3. if death results, be fined under this title or be imprisoned for any number of years up to life, or both.

The Court ultimately held that the additional elements specified in subections (2) and (3)—serious bodily injury and death—were elements of greater crimes that had to be charged in the indictment, submitted to the jury, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Court has never defined what makes a certain fact an "element" subject to the Sixth Amendment jury-trial requirement, as opposed to a mere "sentencing factor" not subject to the requirement. And the Court began by conceding that "at first glance" the three subsections were mere sentencing factors. Yet "countervailing structural considerations" led the Court to conclude that the additional facts in subsections (2) and (3) were in fact elements of two greater crimes.

Reading the text closely, the Court observed that, since none of the numbered subsections can stand by itself as defining a crime, neither can the first paragraph. "In isolation, it would merely describe some very obnoxious behavior, leaving any reader assuming that it must be a crime, but never being actually told that it is. Only the numbered subsidiary provisions complete the thought." Even so, such a close reading of the statutory text only helps to infer congressional intent. "If a given statute is unclear about treating... a fact as element or penalty aggravator, it makes sense to look at what other statutes have done, on the fair assumption that Congress is unlikely to intend any radical departures from past practice without making a point of saying so."

In Almendarez-Torres v. United States, 523 U.S. 224 (1998), Congress's nearly uniform history of treating recidivism as a sentencing factor led the Court to conclude that the aggravating fact there—a prior conviction for certain crimes—was merely a sentencing factor exempt from the jury-trial requirement of the Sixth Amendment. By contrast, Congress has made "serious bodily injury" an element of many crimes, such as assault by a member of the armed forces, 10 U.S.C. § 928; violence at international airports, 18 U.S.C. § 37; and genocide, 18 U.S.C. § 1091. Furthermore, carjacking is a species of robbery, and hence both Congress and state legislatures have traditionally treated serious bodily injury as an element of a more serious robbery crime.

Both the Government and the Ninth Circuit had identified statements of members of Congress that suggested, in their opinion, Congress's intent to make "serious bodily injury" a sentencing factor. The Court was not persuaded, for some members had used the phrase "penalty enhancement", which the Court did not take to mean precisely the same thing as "sentencing factor". The fact that other members had referred to the crime of carjacking, as opposed to the crimes of carjacking, also had little significance for the Court. Ultimately, there was no reason to believe that in this case Congress had abandoned any of the models it had previously employed.

Although there were arguments to be made in favor of treating "serious bodily injury" as a sentencing factor, the rule that statutes should be construed to avoid constitutional difficulties counseled in favor of treating it as an element of the crime. In Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U.S. 684 (1975), the Court had held that a state could not define murder so as to require the defendant to affirmatively prove that he had acted in the heat of passion, so as to reduce the crime to manslaughter. In light of the "centuries-old common law recognition of malice as the fact distinguishing murder from manslaughter" and of the "widely held modern view that heat of passion, once raised by the evidence, was a subject of the State's burden," due process required the state to bear the burden of proving absence of heat of passion. Otherwise, the state could "manipulate its way out" of the requirement that it prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.

In Patterson v. New York, 432 U.S. 197 (1977), however, the Court had held that New York's definition of homicide, which had no malice element, did not improperly force the defendant to disprove that he had acted with malice. New York was free to define homicide without reference to a malice element without violating the traditional rule that the burden of proof in criminal cases rests on the state. And in McMillan v. Pennsylvania, 477 U.S. 79 (1986), the Court held that a mandatory minimum five-year sentence for possessing a firearm was not subject to the jury-trial and proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt requirement, because it did not increase the maximum punishment to which the defendant was exposed.

The distinguishing factor between Mullaney on the one hand and Patterson and McMillan on the other was that the fact in question exposed the defendant to a greater punishment. So too in this case, the facts of "serious bodily injury" or death exposed the defendant charged with federal carjacking to greater punishment than if those facts were not proved. Furthermore, removing these determinations from the jury's purview was not consistent with the role of the jury in the 18th century, which had tremendous control over the punishment a defendant would suffer. Thus, to avoid any unnecessary tension with Mullaney, Patterson, and McMillan, the Court held that these facts were elements of separate federal carjacking crimes.