Justice Kennedy’s interesting interest

In the course of my Legal Affairs debate last week (available here), I lamented that the Blakely line of cases has a troublesome “binary” quality because some matters of relevance at sentencing are getting labeled “elements” (or the functional equivalent), in which case the full panoply of constitutional procedural rights are deemed fully applicable. But other matters, so-called “sentencing factors,” garner the application of very few procedural rights. As I explained in the Debate Club:

Instead of relying on the Sixth Amendment to regulate sentencing procedures in this binary way, I might have preferred the Supreme Court to have developed more nuanced sentencing regulations through the Due Process Clause in order to give legislatures (and sentencing commissions) more flexibility to develop other procedures that would protect defendants’ rights at sentencing.

Because of this view, I was quite intrigued when at oral argument Justice Kennedy seemed interested in exploring with Acting Solicitor General Paul Clement whether different sorts of facts might justify different sorts of treatment under the Blakely rule. Though the oral argument transcript (whenever it is available here) will reveal that this line of questioning did not go anywhere, I am somewhat hopeful that Justice Kennedy may try to develop a more nuanced approach to the (still developing) Blakely doctrine as the Justices start writing all this up.

Specifically, I would think it could be very beneficial for the Supreme Court to start working through a distinction between “offense facts” and “offender facts.” It make a lot of sense to me — and even loosely fits with the existing Apprendi/Blakely jurisprudence — to require the government to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt any and every fact relating to the offense, but to allow facts relating to the offender to be treated “administratively” under more lax procedures (see generally my post here distinguishing adversarial and administrative justice).

Helpfully, some courts and commentators have already started working through distinctions of this sort. Most notably, as explained in State v. Kaua, 72 P.3d 473 (Hawai’i 2003), the courts of Hawai’i have developed a jurisprudence in which so-called “intrinsic factors” are “required to be pled in the indictment and found by the jury” because they “are contemporaneous with, and enmeshed in, the statutory elements of the proscribed offense.” Whereas, in contrast, so-called “extrinsic factors,” which are factors “separable from the offense itself in that they involve consideration of collateral events or information” can be “found by the sentencing court after the defendant’s adjudication of guilt at trial by the trier of fact.” Similarly, in articles such as Kyron Huigens, Solving the Apprendi Puzzle, 90 Geo. L.J. 387 (2002), and David Yellen, Illusion, Illogic, and Injustice: Real Offense Sentencing and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 78 Minn. L. Rev. 403 (1993), and others, commentators have done important work exploring the nature and consequences of different sorts of facts for proof and procedure purposes.

Of course, as Hawai’ian jurisprudence reveals, a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic facts is not self-defining. Or, slightly recast, there can be reasonable disputes over what qualifies as an offense fact and as an offender fact (e.g., role-in-the-offense might be arguably in either or both categories). Nevertheless, redefining Blakely‘s rule in terms of requiring jury trial and proof beyond a reasonable doubt not of all sentence-enhancing facts, but just of all sentence-enhancing “offense facts” I think advances the ball usefully. At the very least, I think an offense/offender distinction could be a more fruitful jurisprudential foray than the tail-wagging-dog jurisprudence that Justice Scalia regrets having lost in footnote 13 of his Blakely decision.