The quiet bombshell

VIRTUALLY every American knows about Miranda, the famous U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring police officers to inform suspects of their rights. But not even many lawyers know about Blakely vs. Washington. Yet this Supreme Court ruling in 2004 took its place alongside Miranda and others -- including Gideon vs. Wainwright (which required states to provide a lawyer to indigent felony defendants) and Terry vs. Ohio (which allowed police to stop and frisk subjects without probable cause) -- as a precedent that would change the course of American criminal justice.

Although the decision had its roots in a dry and abstract legal question, the case itself centered on a horrific crime. Ralph Blakely Jr., a rancher from the state of Washington, had kidnapped his estranged wife at knifepoint, bound her with duct tape and stuffed her into a box in his pickup truck. At sentencing, the trial judge concluded that Blakely had acted with "deliberate cruelty" -- an "aggravating factor" expressly legislated under Washington's sentencing statute -- and, as a result, sentenced Blakely to 90 months in prison instead of the standard 53 months.

But the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the sentence, saying that the 6th Amendment right to a jury trial prohibited judges from increasing criminal sentences on the basis of facts that had not been decided by a jury or confessed to by the defendant. Because a jury had not determined beyond a reasonable doubt that Blakely acted with "deliberate cruelty," the judge could not rely on that fact to increase the sentence. That may not sound like an enormous decision, but it proved revolutionary. Overnight, sentencing rules across the country were thrown into turmoil. Dozens of sentences -- maybe hundreds -- were called into question. If the decision were applied retroactively, how many felons might challenge their sentences?

As many predicted when the Blakely ruling was handed down, the next shoe to drop involved the federal sentencing guidelines for criminal trials -- a massively complex and controversial structure created in the 1980s. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that this vast system of rules also violated the decision in Blakely. The result, for the last two years, has been a state of suspended animation for federal sentencing. Although the justices didn't wipe the federal sentencing guidelines off the books, they ruled that, henceforth, the guidelines must be considered "advisory" rather than mandatory.