Start of today’s Blakely news

Howard Bashman at How Appealing once again does a wonderful job of collecting most of the morning Blakely news here, and Jason Hernandez does a smash-up job giving some of the highlights here. Let me also discuss some items of note from some of these stories:

In this article from the Billings (Montana) Gazette, US District Judge Richard Cebull and US Attorney Bill Mercer discuss their views of the impact of Blakely. And Mercer makes the important point that not all sentencing facts are the same:

Mercer said some sentencing facts may be easy for juries to decide, such as the number of images involved in a child pornography case. Other crimes, like fraud, may require a more difficult analysis if a jury has to decide, for example, a victim’s “reasonably foreseeable” financial harm, he said.

This article from the The Advertiser of Lafayette, Louisiana reports on the efforts of obtain Supreme Court review for Francisco Pineiro, the defendant whose case prompted the Fifth Circuit’s ruling that the federal sentencing system is not affected by Blakely.