Admitting Guild by Professing Innocence: When Sentence Enhancements Bases on "Alford" Pleas Are Unconstitutional

I. INTRODUCTION A few days before Christmas in 1994, in Vineland, New Jersey, Charles Apprendi, Jr. was drunk.1 At 2:04 a.m., he fired several shots from a .22 caliber gun into the home of an African-American family in his neighborhood.2 By 3:05 a.m., he had been arrested and had admitted that he was the shooter.3 Apprendi was interrogated for several hours after these events.4 At 6:04 a.m., he apparently stated that he committed the crime because the victims were black, but he later retracted this statement.5 Apprendi was indicted on twenty-three counts in connection with the shooting, and eventually pleaded guilty to three of them: two counts of second-degree possession of a firearm for an unlawful purpose, and one count of third-degree unlawful possession of an antipersonnel bomb.6 None of the twenty-three counts included any reference to New Jersey's hate crime statute, which allowed between ten and twenty years to be added onto any sentence for a crime that was motivated. Nor did any of the twenty-three counts even allege that Apprendi acted with a racially biased purpose.7 The maximum possible sentence for a single second-degree firearm possession conviction was ten years. Apprendi, however, was sentenced to twelve years on a single second-degree count.8 The judge found it more likely than not that Apprendi had committed the shooting because of racial bias against the victims, and imposed a two-year enhancement under New Jersey's hate crime statute.9 The Supreme Court held that Apprendi's hate crime enhancement was unconstitutional because it was based on a finding made by a judge on a preponderance of the evidence instead of by a jury a reasonable doubt. Noting that the judge's application of the sentence enhancement was significant because it increased - indeed it doubled - the maximum range within which the judge could exercise his discretion, the Court focused on the process by which the enhancement was applied.10 It ruled that [m]erely using the label 'sentence enhancement' to describe [the hate crime statute] surely does not provide a principled basis for treating it any differently from the possession statute under which Apprendi was convicted.11 In other words, regardless of whether a defendant sentenced to jail time because of a sentence enhancement statute or a criminal statute, the process the same: both require a finding of fact a reasonable doubt. Because the hate crime statute at issue authorized an enhanced sentence if a judge found on a mere preponderance of the evidence that a crime was racially motivated, it effectively authorized judges to bypass this constitutionally mandated process. The Supreme Court, therefore, vacated Apprendi's sentence and declared the particular hate crime enhancement at issue invalid. Although Apprendi was convicted by entering a regular guilty plea, defendants in most states and in the federal system have the option of entering an Alford plea, which a means of pleading guilty without admitting factual guilt.12 Alford pleas allow equivocating defendants to take a deal without having to admit guilt. They also allow defendants for whom a guilty plea simply the best deal to take it, with no further questions asked. When it comes to sentencing, however, Alford pleas can create constitutional tension. In Apprendi v. New Jersey and Blakely v. Washington, the Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment requires that any fact that increases a defendant's maximum sentence, other than a prior conviction, must be proven to a jury a reasonable doubt.13 As Justice Scalia wrote in Blakely, the Sixth Amendment's jury trial right is no mere procedural formality, but a fundamental reservation of power in our constitutional structure.14 Although the jury typically has the duty of making the beyond a reasonable doubt determination, defendants can also establish this level of proof by admitting the crime. …