In United States v. Haymond, 588 U.S. --- (2019), Justice Gorsuch begins: "Only a jury, acting on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, may take a person’s liberty. That promise stands as one of the Constitution’s most vital protections against arbitrary government."
This case, in the Apprendi line, involved supervised release violation sentencing under 18 U.S.C. §3583(k). Under that provision, if a judge finds by a preponderance of the evidence that a defendant on supervised release committed one of several enumerated offenses, including the possession of child pornography, the judge must impose an additional prison term of at least five years and up to life without regard to the length of the prison term authorized for the defendant’s initial crime of conviction.
The Court found this mandatory minimum sentence, based on judge-found facts, unconstitutional. It remanded to the 10th Circuit to determine remedy: whether the mandatory minimum had to be excised or whether the district court could impanel a sentencing jury
Here are some aspects of the opinion I found noteworthy:
- "At oral argument, the government even conceded that, under its theory, a defendant on supervised release would have no Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial when charged with an infraction carrying the death penalty. We continue to doubt whether even Apprendi’s fiercest critics 'would advocate' such an 'absurd result.'"
- FN 7: "Just as we have no occasion to decide whether §3583(k) implicates Apprendi by raising the ceiling of permissible punishments beyond those authorized by the jury’s verdict, see n. 4, supra, we do not pass judgment one way or the other on §3583(e)’s consistency with Apprendi. Nor do we express a view on the mandatory revocation provision for certain drug and gun violations in §3583(g), which requires courts to impose 'a term of imprisonment' of unspecified length." [This FN is really important. We should preserve constitutional challenges to mandatory imprisonment under section 3583(e)].
Finally, here is a really good passage to end on:
In the end, the dissent is left only to echo an age-old criticism: Jury trials are inconvenient for the government. Yet like much else in our Constitution, the jury system isn’t designed to promote efficiency but to protect liberty. In what now seems a prescient passage, Blackstone warned that the true threat to trial by jury would come less from “open attacks,” which “none will be so hardy as to make,” as from subtle “machinations, which may sap and undermine i[t] by introducing new and arbitrary methods.” 4 Blackstone 343. This Court has repeatedly sought to guard the historic role of the jury against such incursions. For “however convenient these may appear at first, (as doubtless all arbitrary powers, well executed, are the most convenient) yet let it be again remembered, that delays, and little inconveniences in the forms of justice, are the price that all free nations must pay for their liberty in more substantial matters.”
