Justice Neil Gorsuch voted with the liberal wing of the Supreme Court on Wednesday in favor of a sex offender sentenced to additional prison time after violating the terms of his supervised release.
The divided court found unconstitutional a federal law that requires a judge to impose a five-year mandatory minimum on a registered sex offender found to have violated release conditions. The ruling reaffirmed the right to a trial by jury.
Gorsuch was joined in his opinion by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in ruling the application of the law violated defendant Andre Haymond’s right to a trial by jury, while Justice Stephen Breyer concurred in judgment.
“Only a jury, acting on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, may take a person’s liberty. That promise stands as one of the Constitution’s most vital protections against arbitrary government,” Gorsuch wrote in his opinion. “Yet in this case a congressional statute compelled a federal judge to send a man to prison for a minimum of five years without empaneling a jury of his peers or requiring the government to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“As applied here,” Gorsuch said, “we do not hesitate to hold that the statute violates the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.”
Haymond in 2010 was found guilty by a jury of possessing child pornography. He was sentenced to 38 months in prison and 10 years of supervised release.
But during his supervised release, Haymond was found again with what appeared to be child pornography, and the government accused him of violating the terms of his release.
He subsequently appeared before a district court judge but no jury, and the judge found him guilty by a preponderance of evidence.
Because Haymond committed a crime covered under a federal law that requires a judge to impose a five-year mandatory minimum, he was sentenced to an additional five years in prison.
The judge, however, said it was “repugnant” that the statute imposed a “mandatory five-year sentence in such a case where the defendant does not have the opportunity to ask for a jury or to be tried under what should be the legal standard that is beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Haymond challenged the constitutionality of his new sentence, and the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the law violated the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
In his opinion, Gorsuch noted that the Supreme Court has “long recognized that penalties for supervised release violations arise from and are treated as part of the sentence for the original criminal offense.”
“Consider the alternative,” he said. “If the government were correct, you could be convicted of even a modest crime and put on supervised release for the rest of your life. Then a judge, acting without a jury and under a preponderance of the evidence standard, could convict you of a violation and sentence you to just about anything. That cannot be right.”
But Justice Samuel Alito, who was joined in his dissent by the three other conservative justices, warned that under the court’s ruling, it would be impossible for the federal courts to impanel enough juries to adjudicate alleged violations of supervised release.
“In short, under the plurality opinion, the whole system of supervised release would be like a 40-ton truck speeding down a steep mountain road with no brakes,” Alito said.
The ruling from the high court Wednesday marked the second time this week Gorsuch joined his liberal colleagues in a case involving crime.
In a 5-4 ruling Monday, he split from his conservative colleagues in striking down a federal law authorizing heightened penalties for a person who uses, carries, or possesses a firearm in certain crimes of violence.
