The Minnesota courts officially address Blakely

It is a big Blakely day in the states. Following the important decisions out of New Jersey (noted here), we also today get noteworthy rulings from Minnesota.

For quite some time, the Minnesota Courts of Appeals have been just remanding cases raising Blakely issues, as noted here (and see also today’s State v. Conley, 2004 WL 2283421, (Minn. App. Oct. 12, 2004). Of course, these decision have been against the backdrop of the reports by the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission (available here and here) which concede that there are Blakely-problematic elements of state law.

Today, officially, the Minnesota Court of Appeals holds, in two published decisions, that Blakely invalidates upward departures and sentences under Minnesota’s “career offender” statute. The decisions in Minnesota v. Conger, A03-1771 (Minn. App. Oct. 12, 2004), and Minnesota v. Mitchell, A03-110 (Minn. App. Oct. 12, 2004), are both quite interesting reads, especially because the state apparently has been arguing that Blakely is inapplicable in Minnesota because the “Minnesota sentencing guidelines are not mandatory but merely ‘advisory to the district court.'” In Conger, the court reject this claim in the following passage:

[E]ven though the sentencing guidelines are advisory to the district court, and a person convicted of a felony does not have a right to receive the presumptive, fixed sentence established by the Sentencing Guidelines Commission for that person’s offense, a district court that does not impose the presumptive, fixed sentence is required to make findings of fact that support the court’s reasons for departing from the presumptive sentence. This means that under the Minnesota sentencing procedures, the applicable presumptive, fixed sentence established by the Sentencing Guidelines Commission is the maximum sentence that a judge may impose without finding facts that support a departure, and a judge who imposes an upward durational departure must do so in a manner that complies with the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution as explained in Blakely.