Statement of Barry Scheck, President-Elect, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers on today's Supreme Court decision in Blakely v. Washington:

Beyond a doubt, today’s decision in Blakely spells the end of sentencing guidelines -- as we know them. The decision does not represent a step backward from the goal of sentencing reform, but a great leap forward, because it stands for the proposition that no defendant in a U.S. court will be punished for an unproven crime.

The key issue in Blakely was that the judge found a fact, after the defendant’s plea, that increased his sentence by almost three years. It has always been NACDL's position that facts that substantially increase a defendant's sentence should be admitted by the defendant at his guilty plea or found by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Today’s decision is a logical application of that principle. As Justice Scalia said in the opinion of the Court, it is too much to believe that the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers was “duped” into taking the wrong side on such an important issue as fairness in criminal proceedings.

In NACDL’s friend of the court brief, authors Adam Steinman, Sheryl Gordon
McCloud and David M. Porter wrote that "failing to apply Apprendi to exceptional sentences upward creates a situation where a defendant may be punished for a crime that no jury has considered -- much less delivered a verdict of conviction -- and for which the ... reasonable doubt standard has not and cannot be met."