Cunningham V. California - Majority Opinion

Majority Opinion

In Apprendi v. New Jersey, the Court ruled that any fact that increases a defendant's punishment above the statutory maximum punishment must be submitted to a jury and proved beyond a reasonable doubt. In Blakely v. Washington, the Court ruled that, for purposes of the Apprendi rule, the "statutory maximum" is the greatest sentence the judge may impose based solely on the facts found by the jury. Blakely and United States v. Booker, for example, involved sentencing schemes in which the judge was required to impose a sentence within a range determined both by the crime of conviction and additional facts. In those schemes, if the judge chose a sentence above that range, or chose one from a higher range, the facts that allowed the judge to do so had to be submitted to a jury and proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Under California's DSL, the middle term is the "statutory maximum" sentence for Blakely purposes. The DSL required judges to impose the middle term unless aggravating factors were found to exist, and those aggravating factors by definition did not include any element of the crime. Thus, the maximum sentence the judge could impose based solely on the jury's findings was the middle term, not the high term.

Nevertheless, in People v. Black, the California Supreme Court held that the DSL survived Blakely intact because the DSL merely set forth a sentencing range within which the judge was allowed to exercise his traditional discretion to impose an appropriate sentence. The Black court concluded that the DSL was merely a legislative attempt to provide guidance to trial courts in selecting appropriate aggravating factors on which to base a high-term sentence. But this does not justify "shield a sentencing system from the force of" Blakely. The Black court also reasoned that the DSL did not violate Blakely because, overall, it reduced sentences vis-à-vis the indeterminate sentencing scheme. Furthermore, the Black court noted that under California law, sentencing enhancement, which are distinct from aggravating factors, did have to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. These two differences, it reasoned, meant that the DSL survived Blakely. But Apprendi set forth a bright-line rule that did not tolerate "trivial" incursions in the name of preserving the "basic" jury-trial right of the criminal defendant.

Nor could the DSL survive because it was functionally indistinguishable from the post-Booker sentencing scheme in place for federal crimes. Just as federal judges have discretion to impose a "reasonable" sentence by referring to a set of broad criteria, the Black court reasoned, California trial judges have broad discretion to impose a sentence within a predetermined range. But this characterization of the DSL was not accurate, for California had adopted "sentencing triads, three fixed sentences with no ranges between them. Cunningham's sentencing judge had no discretion to select a sentence within the range of 6 to 16 years. Her instruction was to select 12 years, nothing less and nothing more, unless she found facts allowing the imposition of a sentence of 6 or 16 years. Factfinding to elevate a sentence from 12 to 16 years, our decisions make plain, 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." The "reasonableness" standard operates within the Sixth Amendment constraint, not as a substitute for it.

It was up to California to tailor its sentencing scheme to conform with the Court's decision, just as other states had conformed their sentencing schemes to conform with Apprendi and Blakely. Some states allow the jury to make the necessary findings during trial; others do so in a post-trial sentencing hearing; still others "have chosen to permit judges genuinely to exercise broad discretion within a statutory range, which, everyone agrees, encounters no Sixth Amendment shoal."