SCOTUSblog by Amy Howe 2/26/2019
Argument analysis: Court poised to rule for challenger in dispute over constitutionality of sex-offender law
This morning the Supreme Court heard oral argument in a dispute over the constitutionality of a federal law that requires convicted sex offenders to return to prison for at least five years – and possibly for the rest of their lives – if a judge finds that they have committed certain crimes. The defendant in the case, an Oklahoma man who served time for possessing child pornography and was then sent back to prison after he violated the terms of his supervised release, argues that the law violates his right to have his sentence determined by a jury, rather than a judge, beyond a reasonable doubt. Today the justices seemed overwhelmingly likely to agree with him, even if it was not entirely clear how they will remedy the constitutional violation.
Andre Haymond was convicted of possessing child pornography in 2010. Haymond was sentenced to 38 months in prison, followed by 10 years of supervised release, and required to register as a sex offender.
In 2015, a federal district court sent Haymond back to prison for five more years. Applying the “preponderance of the evidence†standard, which is all that the law in question requires, the court concluded that it was more likely than not that Haymond had violated the terms of his supervised release by possessing pornography and child pornography.
A federal appeals court agreed that Haymond had violated the terms of his supervised release but threw out the new five-year sentence. It concluded that the law requiring the additional five-year sentence was unconstitutional because it increased the minimum sentence that Haymond could face, in conflict with the Supreme Court’s cases holding that a jury, rather than a judge, must find beyond a reasonable doubt any facts that increase the penalty for a crime.
Eric Feigin, an assistant to the U.S. solicitor general, defended the law on behalf of the federal government. But he was quickly interrupted by a skeptical Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who asked him whether there was any other area of the law in which the United States allows a defendant to be sent to prison based on the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard.
Feigin responded that both parole and probation operate in a similar way, but Sotomayor dismissed that analogy as comparing “apples and oranges.†With parole, she stressed, the state gives a benefit by cutting a sentence short. Where do we allow more prison time based on the preponderance of the evidence, she repeated?
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/02/argument-analysis-court-poised-to-rule-for-challenger-in-dispute-over-constitutionality-of-sex-offender-law/#more-283329
