Another Booker, this one in Florida, prevails on a notable Sixth Amendment Blakely claim

I came across a Florida intermediate appellate court opinion today finding Sixth Amendment problems in a Florida statute, but I likely would not have blogged about were it not for the surname of the defendant: Booker!  The name Booker (Freddie J.) will be forever connected to the transformation of the federal sentencing system.  Another Booker (Reginald Lee) seems unlikely to have quite the same impact on Florida sentencing, but his case is still interesting for hard-core Apprendi/Blakely fans.  Here are excerpts from Booker v. Florida, No. 1D15-3558 (Fla. 1st Dist. April 18, 2018)(available here):

The Florida Legislature, faced with budgetary challenges in 2009, sought to reduce the burden of prison expense on the Department of Corrections by mandating that specified, nonviolent offenders, who score under twenty-two points on their criminal scoresheet, be sentenced to nonstate sanctions — thereby shifting incarceration of these offenders to county jails for a maximum of up to one year.  [But it also provided] "if the court makes written findings that a nonstate prison sanction could present a danger to the public, the court may sentence the offender to a state correctional facility."  [This provision], which was used to enhance Booker’s sentence to a state prison sanction, is the focus of the Sixth Amendment claim at issue....

Given the momentous role of the jury in our country’s legal history, and the clarity of the stated principle in Apprendi and Blakely that judicial fact-finding is no substitute for jury factfinding if used for sentencing beyond a relevant statutory maximum, we conclude that the last sentence of subsection (10) violates this principle as applied to Booker.  It empowered precisely what Apprendi and Blakely condemn: giving a trial judge the power to make factual findings independent of the jury (here, about future public dangerousness) that are used to increase an offender’s sentence beyond the maximum allowable by the “facts reflected in the jury verdict alone.” Blakely, 542 U.S. at 303.  As applied to Booker, the result is that, rather than be subject to a maximum of up to a year in a county jail, he is sent to state prison for four years — based solely on factual findings as to his potential for future dangerousness upon which only a judge, not a jury, has passed....

Put simply, section 775.082(10)’s enactment shifted the sentencing paradigm markedly, and in the process eliminated the ability of a jury verdict alone to impose a state prison sanction.  Protection of the jury trial right does not hamstring the Legislature’s ability to achieve its policy goals, however.  For example, if section 775.082(10) required a jury — rather than a judge — to make factual findings about an offender’s potential for future dangerousness, the check on personal liberty that the Sixth Amendment’s right to a jury trial provides would be retained.  A simple legislative fix might be to amend subsection (10) to say: “. . . if the court a jury makes written findings that a nonstate prison sanction could present a danger to the public, the court may sentence the offender to a state correctional facility pursuant to this section.”  Courts, except by rewriting a clearly-worded statute, cannot achieve this policy result.

Notably, this opinion concludes by noting conflicts with other Florida appellate rulings and then certifying the issue as of "great public importance" for the Florida Supreme Court. So maybe we have not heard the last of the name Booker in Florida.