s 5-4 ruling finds juries must make decisions to enhance criminal penalties

WASHINGTON - In a ruling that even some on the high court say could wreak havoc in legislatures and courtrooms around the nation, the Supreme Court on Thursday barred judges from unilaterally bumping up sentences for convicted criminals.

Instead, the justices said, before a robber gets more time for showing no remorse or a rapist draws a bigger sentence for being excessively cruel, a jury must find that those aggravating factors were proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

The 5-4 ruling, a result of alliances that defy the court's well-known political divisions, extends the logic the court used in 2002 for death sentences to all other crimes. That logic has its roots in a 2000 decision that said juries, not judges, needed to make all fact-finding decisions that enhance penalties.

The Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial is "no mere procedural formality," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. "The framers would not have thought it too much to demand that, before depriving a man of ... his liberty, the state should suffer the modest inconvenience of submitting its accusation to" a vote of his peers.

The court overturned the conviction of a Washington man who pleaded guilty to kidnapping his estranged wife. The judge in his case tacked three years onto a four-year sentence because he said Ralph Howard Blakely Jr. had acted with "deliberate cruelty" in committing the crime.

Even though state law permitted the judge to increase the sentence for those reasons, the high court said Thursday that decision required additional fact-finding that the Constitution reserves for juries, not judges.

Defense lawyers hailed Thursday's decision as the most important in more than a decade, saying it represents a fundamental shift in power away from prosecutors and toward juries.

"The Supreme Court, in this case, has breathed life back into the jury trial,"' said Miami defense attorney David Markus. "This is a 9.0 on the Richter scale for defense lawyers."

Attorneys said the ruling may force prosecutors to state upfront, in jury trials or indictments, all the evidence they intend to use to prosecute their cases, said Milton Hirsch, a prominent Miami defense lawyer.

"You could call this the truth-in-indicting case," Hirsch said.

While prosecutors scrambled to fully grasp the implications of the watershed ruling - the Justice Department issued a terse comment that it was "reviewing the ruling" - federal public defenders were already prepping for the next day in court.

"We're in a whole new world," said Reuben Cahn, the chief assistant federal public defender in Miami.

Joining Scalia in the majority were court liberals John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well as moderate David Souter and the court's other arch-conservative, Clarence Thomas.

Dissenting were Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a court conservative, moderates Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor, and liberal Stephen Breyer.

Three of the four dissenting justices wrote separately to take issue with Scalia's thinking and decry the "damage" they believe it will inflict upon sentencing schemes. The ruling wouldn't lead to more consistent sentencing, they argued; it would take courts back to a time when sentencing was arbitrary and susceptible to racial and other biases.

None was more pointed than the dissent of O'Connor, who took the unusual step of reading from her dissent on the bench Thursday.

Since the 1980s, many states have tried to bring some consistency to criminal sentences by setting up guidelines for judges. Many set out reasons to enhance or diminish sentences and prohibit judges from deviating from those reasons.

O'Connor said Thursday's ruling says to states: "If you want to constrain the sentencing discretion of judges and bring some uniformity to sentencing, it will cost you - dearly."

O'Connor said under the court's new rule, any fact that could mean more jail time is now considered an element of the crime. "Thus, facts that historically have been taken into account by sentencing judges to assess a sentence within a broad range ... all must now be charged in an indictment and submitted to a jury."

Because prosecutors often can't use character evidence or other aggravators at trial, O'Connor said the ruling could cause states to have to conduct more than one trial. "The costs are real and substantial," O'Connor said.

"How are courts to mete out guidelines sentences? Do they jettison the guidelines altogether? The court ignores the havoc it is about to wreak on trial courts across the country."

Presumably, O'Connor said, Thursday's ruling could also have an important effect on federal sentencing guidelines, which also permit judges to consider aggravating facts when meting out punishment.

Breyer, a member of the U.S. sentencing commission, issued a dissent fraught with detailed examples of the problems he believes the ruling will cause. He said forcing prosecutors to enumerate every aggravating factor of a crime gives them too much discretion and takes the sentencing system "away from, not toward, one important guideline goal: rough uniformity of punishment for those who engage in roughly the same real criminal conduct."