Supreme Court Denies Petition for Writ of Certiora

Justices Scalia, Thomas and Ginsburg filed their dissent this morning in a case in which the three petitioners had argued that their sentences would have been substantively unreasonable but for judge-found facts, and were thus illegal under the Sixth Amendment.

A jury convicted petitioners Joseph Jones, Desmond Thurston, and Antwuan Ball of distributing very small amounts of crack cocaine, and acquitted them of conspiring to distribute drugs. The sentencing judge, however, found that they had engaged in the charged conspiracy and, relying largely on that finding, imposed sentences that petitioners say were many times longer than those the Guidelines would otherwise have recommended.

The three justices noted that the Court, in Rita v. United States, had left for another day the question whether the Sixth Amendment is violated when courts impose sentences that, but for a judge-found fact, would be reversed for substantive unreasonableness.  The justices wrote that the Court should grant certiorari to put an end to the unbroken string of cases disregarding the Sixth Amendment—or to eliminate the Sixth Amendment difficulty by acknowledging that all sentences below the statutory maximum are substantively reasonable.