In People. Nguyen the California Supreme Court answers the question of whether a juvenile conviction, in which California does not grant a jury trial can serve as a prior conviction under Apprendi In Apprendi the United States Supreme Court ruled that in order to sentence someone to an aggravated sentence all facts must be determined by a jury or by admission. The Supreme Court left one exception to the rule and that is prior convictions. It said:

Other than the fact of a prior conviction, any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

But, under California law, a finding that a crime was committed in juvenile court is an adjudication, not a conviction and as Justice Kennard points out in dissent one reason for this is that a juvenile is not permitted to have a jury trial.

Nguyen, as part of a plea bargain, plead to possession of a weapon by a convicted felon and submitted the question of whether a prior juvenile adjudication for assault with a deadly weapon was a strike under the Three Strikes Law to a Court trial. The court found that it was a strike and therefore doubled his sentence from 16 months to 32 months. If he had two strikes he would have been sentenced to a minimum of 25 years to life.

The majority gives two reasons for finding that an adjudication in a juvenile matter can be used a prior conviction in a three strikes case despite not being found to be true by a jury.

First in the adult matter all findings of fact are made by a jury. The jury is allowed to determine whether or not there is a prior conviction and whether the conviction is for a matter that comes within the purview of the Three Strikes Law. Since the failure to submit the juvenile case to a jury is not in the case for which the person is going to be sentenced the matter is not strictly one that comes under Apprendi.

Second, under Apprendi the issue which triggers the additional punishment is not the felonious conduct which lead to the juvenile adjudication, but rather the fact of the prior adjudication. As the Supreme Court stated in Apprendi it is the fact of the conviction, not the felonious conduct which increases the sentence.

If the issue is not the felonious conduct, but rather the fact of a prior conviction and if we assume that for purposes of the three strikes law a conviction and an adjudication are the same thing as the Court does then the defendant gets a trial on all matters which increase the sentence since he/she is entitled to a trial on whether or not there was a prior conviction.

But as Kennard points out the purpose for doubling the sentence for a prior strike is not the fact of the conviction but rather the fact that the individual continues to perform felonious conduct. Furthermore Appprendi justifies the prior conviction exception to the requirement that any fact used to increase a sentence must be approved by a jury by arguing that

unlike virtually any other consideration used to enlarge the possible penalty for an offense . . . a prior conviction must itself have been established through procedures satisfying the fair notice, reasonable doubt, and jury trial guarantees.

Thus if a prior conviction is only exempt from the need for being found by a jury if it is based on fair notice, reasonable doubt and a jury trial the facts of a juvenile conviction, found without a jury trial cannot be used to increase a sentence.

In the groundbreaking case of Apprendi v. New Jersey>the United States Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment required that any fact used to raise a sentence above the statutory maximum must be found to be true by a jury by a beyond a reasonable doubt standard. Four years later in Blakely v. Washington the Supreme Court reaffirmed Apprendi and clarified it by holding that a sentence cannot be in excess of that which could have been imposed based solely on the facts admitted by the defendant or found to be true by the jury.

In 2007 the United States Supreme Court applied Blakely to the California sentencing law. Under the California law for each crime, the court had three alternatives. It could either sentence a defendant to the normal sentence generally called the mid-term or if mitigating or aggravating factors were present the court could sentence the defendant to a lower or higher sentence. The problem the Supreme Court found in Cunningham v. California is that in order to sentence someone to the aggravated term a judge had to find that factors were present beyond those found by the jury. Such a system violated the Sixth Amendment’s right to a jury trial.

The California Supreme Court ruled in In re Gomez that Cunningham is retroactive to Blakely.

The Courts use the Teague test to determine whether a case is retroactive or not. Under the Teague test a decision applying a new rule is applicable to a state case only if the earlier decision was not final at the time the defendant’s conviction became final. Here the State Supreme Court ruled that Cunningham v. California was not a new rule in that it was merely an application of Blakely The State Supreme Court found that it was not a new rule despite the fact that Blakely was susceptible to different interpretations by reasonable jurists in that California court had found the California law valid after the Cunningham decision but before the Blakely decision and the lack of unanimity in the Cunningham decision.

So finally the California Supreme Court appears to be giving up its battle with the United States Supreme Court over the validity of the sentencing law. While the In re Gomez
decision appears to be correct since only the state Supreme Court’s failure to apply Blakely to California law required the United States Supreme Court to issue Cunningham. The Cunningham decision was forced by the California Supreme Court’s decision in People v. Black in which the California Supreme Court refused to apply Blakely to California sentencing law.

But while the California Supreme Court initially refused to accept Blakely the state legislature understood Blakely and Cunningham and replaced the sentencing law. As a result the In re Gomez decision will apply to relatively few people who will be able to file a writ of habeas corpus in an attempt to get their sentences reduced from the aggravated sentence to the mid term. As to Gomez he has already completed his term for rape and he is on parole.