The Supreme Court mostly wrapped up its docket for October Term 2024 this morning with a whole bunch of 6-3 rulings in civil cases sure to garner lots of attention. (I say “mostly” because there is likely to be a “clean up” order list and perhaps more next week before the Justices get out their beach chairs.) I hope to find some time in the coming days to review and assess the Court’s work in criminal/sentencing cases during OT 24, though my vague sense is that criminal defendants did relatively well across the range of cases.
In the meantime, it dawned on me recently that this week marks a full 25 years since the Supreme Court handed down its landmark sentencing procedure ruling in Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000). Though I still think of Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004), as the case that most dramatically altered modern sentencing process, Apprendi was the case that first majestically announced the constitutional principles and core doctrinal holdings, rooted in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, that have defined cerain procedural essentials of sentencing for now a full quarter of a century.
Though I suspect few reading this blog will dispute Apprendi‘s importance, I also suspect that those who were not actively lawyering in the early 2000s may not quite get why Justice O’Connor lamented the ruling as a misguided “watershed change in constitutional law” and why Justice Breyer feared the ruling could “threaten[] the workability of every criminal justice system.” Part of this reality is that the immediate fall-out from Apprendi transpired in roughly the first decade after the ruling. But, even more significantly, the Supreme Court has mostly abandoned continued Apprendi...
