The most well known of these reforms was the federal Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, 18 U. S. C. § 3551 et seq. but its reasoning strongly suggests that they are not. There, Wisconsin provided that the willful and malicious burning of a dwelling house in which "the life of no person shall have been destroyed" was punishable by 7 to 14 years in prison, but that the same burning at a time in which "there was no person lawfully in the dwelling house" was punishable by only 3 to 10 years in prison. Ante, at 497 (emphasis in original) (quoting Almendarez-Torres, 523 U. S., at 257, n. 2 (SCALIA, J., dissenting)). In 1878, Maryland's high court, in Maguire v. State, 47 Md. 2d, at 494. Hope was indicted for and convicted of larceny. Because the indictment did not allege that anyone had been present in the dwelling, the court reversed the defendant's 14-year sentence, but, relying on Larned, supra, the court remanded to permit sentencing under the lowest grade of the crime (which was properly alleged in the indictment). The rule was succinctly stated by Justice Clifford in his separate opinion in United States v. Reese, 92 U. S. 214, 232-233 (1876): "[T]he indictment must contain an allegation of every fact which is legally essential to the punishment to be inflicted." Without that critical finding, the maximum sentence to which the defendant is exposed is life imprisonment, and not the death penalty. We have explained why we believe the Constitution, as interpreted in McMillan and earlier cases, does not impose that requirement." Walton held that, so long as the jury was the factfinder as to the defendant's guilt, the judge could be the factfinder as to aggravating-sentencing factors. See ante, at 492-493. As the Court acknowledges, we have never doubted that the Constitution permits Congress and the state legislatures to define criminal offenses, to prescribe broad ranges of punishment for those offenses, and to give judges discretion to decide where within those ranges a particular defendant's punishment should be set. See ante, at 486 ("[C]onstitutional limits" prevent States from "defin[ing] away facts necessary to constitute a criminal offense"). 364; Steel v. Smith, 1 Barn. Cf. In one bold stroke the Court today casts aside our traditional cautious approach and instead embraces a universal and seemingly bright-line rule limiting the power of Congress and state legislatures to define criminal offenses and the sentences that follow from convictions thereunder. 609, 610-611, 79 P. 283, 284-285 (1904). Id., at 527; see Goeller v. State, 119 Md. See also id., at 495 ("But clearly the substantive offence, which draws to itself the greater punishment, is the unlawful sale after a former conviction. 477 U. S., at 86-88. tion stretches back to the earliest years of the Republic.

Second, New Jersey could provide that a defendant convicted under the statute whom a judge finds, by a preponderance of the evidence, not to have acted with a purpose to intimidate an individual on the basis of race may receive a sentence no greater than 10 years' imprisonment. senters is that they are unable to say what the right to trial by jury does guarantee if, as they assert, it does not guarantee-what it has been assumed to guarantee throughout our history-the right to have a jury determine those facts that determine the maximum sentence the law allows. Held: The Constitution requires that any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum, other than the fact of a prior conviction, must be submitted to a jury and proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Numerous high courts contemporaneously and explicitly agreed that Bishop had accurately captured the common-law understanding of what facts are elements of a crime. Pp.

But the matter was quite simple for the Massachusetts high court. The majority examined a range of precedents in finding that any enhancement that raises the penalty of a crime above the statutory maximum sentence must be considered by a jury and proved by a reasonable doubt rather than evaluated by a judge according to a lower standard of proof. He felt that it would be inappropriate to subject each defendant convicted of a certain crime to the same sentence, since the harm caused by their conduct could vary widely. See id., at 51 (indictment); id., at 188 (proof). Sentencing enhancements may be new creatures, but the question that they create for courts is not. ). A divided New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed. Taking a pragmatic perspective, Breyer pointed out that each sentencing process is unique, and it would be impossible for a jury to have control over every factor going into it.

See also id., at 241 ("[T]here is a gradation of offences of the same species" where the statute sets out "various degrees of punishment"). Thus, using the terminology that the Court itself employs to describe the constitutional fault in the New Jersey sentencing scheme presented here, under Arizona law, the judge's finding that a statutory aggravating circumstance exists "exposes the criminal defendant to a penalty exceeding the maximum he would receive if punished according to the facts reflected in the jury verdict alone." None of the counts referred to the hate crime statute, and none alleged that Apprendi acted with a racially biased purpose. Synopsis of Rule of Law.

The substantive criminal law tended to be sanction-specific; it prescribed a particular sentence for each offense. That is because a maximum sentence set by statute trumps a higher sentence set forth in the Guidelines. If New Jersey can, consistent with the Constitution, make precisely the same differences in punishment turn on precisely the same facts, and can remove the assessment of those facts from the jury and subject them to a standard of proof below "beyond a reasonable doubt," it is impossible to say that the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments require the Court's rule.

See, e. g., ante, at 490. According to the Court, its constitutional rule "emerges from our history and case law." In a later edition, Bishop similarly defined the elements of a crime as "that wrongful aggregation out of which the punishment proceeds." the equivalent factual determinations under a determinatesentencing scheme. relevant conduct, with sensitivity to the need for procedural protections where sentencing factors are determined by a judge (for example, use of a "reasonable doubt" standard), and invocation of the Due Process Clause where the history of the crime at issue, together with the nature of the facts to be proved, reveals unusual and serious procedural unfairness.

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