Big Blakely/Booker case from Ohio

I have previously highlighted that Ohio’s sentencing laws and practices make the state a Blakely bellwether because Blakely‘s impact on Ohio’s sentencing scheme could be extreme or extremely minor (background here and here).  To its great credit, as detailed in memos linked here, Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission has been tracking Blakely developments closely, and this memo from last month provides a great overview of the Blakely caselaw in Ohio before Booker hit the scene.  As the memo notes (and as previously reported here), most of Ohio’s intermediate appellate courts have found, on various grounds, that Blakely is largely inapplicable in Ohio. 

But, in a major development that is well covered in this newspaper article, a decision yesterday from the First Appellate District in State v. Bruce, 2005-Ohio-373 (Ohio 1st Dist. Feb. 4, 2005) (available here), concludes that Booker significantly changes the Blakely analysis in Ohio.  Here’s the court’s explanation:

After the Blakely decision, this court and the Ohio Sentencing Commission speculated that Apprendi and Blakely did not materially affect the Ohio sentencing scheme.  Unlike the sentencing guidelines in the state of Washington and the federal criminal system, Ohio’s scheme does not permit a sentencing court to deviate from a prescribed range of sentences for any felony.  Thus, the term “statutory maximum” was believed to be synonymous with “statutory range,” or the range of years of imprisonment set by the General Assembly for each felony punishment.  Since a sentencing court cannot exceed “the statutory range authorized by law,” the consensus then was that the Sixth Amendment was not implicated by Ohio’s sentencing statutes.

The statutory range for a first-degree felony is three to ten years. Under our previous reasoning, the sentencing court would have discretion to impose the longest sentence within that range as long as it made the factual finding that the defendant was an offender who had committed the “worst form[]” of the offense or posed the greatest likelihood of recidivism. The sentencing statutes “vest the exclusive responsibility to make th[is] determination[] in the court and not in a jury.” Unlike the additional findings made by the sentencing courts in Apprendi or Blakely, we reasoned, the finding that a defendant had committed the worst form of the offense did not increase the sentence beyond the statutory range.

In light of the recent decision of the United States Supreme Court in United States v. Booker, it is clear that this interpretation was wrong.  In Booker, the Court reexamined its analysis in Apprendi and its progeny and held that “we reaffirm our holding in Apprendi: Any fact (other than a prior conviction) which is necessary to support a sentence exceeding the maximum authorized by the facts established by a plea of guilty or a jury verdict must be admitted by the defendant or proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.” The prescribed statutory maximum sentence is not “the maximum sentence a judge may impose after finding additional facts, but the maximum he may impose without any additional findings.”

The holding, as reaffirmed in Booker, applies to “all cases on direct review or not yet final.” Accordingly, the Blakely definition of “prescribed maximum sentence” applies to this case.  Here, the trial court imposed a sentence upon Bruce that was within the statutory range authorized by the Ohio General Assembly for first-degree felonies.  But the maximum sentence the trial court could impose without additional facts proved to a jury or admitted to by Bruce was nine years, not ten. The additional fact necessary to impose the tenth year of imprisonment — that Bruce was among those offenders “who [had] committed the worst forms of the offense” — was found by the trial court at the sentencing hearing, after Bruce’s plea had been accepted. Therefore, the Sixth Amendment prohibited the imposition of the longest term of imprisonment. R.C. 2929.14(A)(1) and 2929.14(C) are unconstitutional to the extent that they permit a sentencing court to impose a sentence exceeding the maximum term authorized by the facts admitted by the defendant or proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.