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John Cunningham was tried and convicted of continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14. Under California's determinate sentencing law (DSL), that offense was punishable by one of three precise terms of imprisonment: a lower term sentence of 6 years, a middle term sentence of 12 years, or an upper term sentence of 16 years. The DSL obliged the trial judge to sentence Cunningham to the 12-year middle term unless the judge found one or more additional "circumstances in aggravation." Court rules adopted to implement the DSL defined "circumstances in aggravation" as facts that justify the upper term. Those facts, the rules provided, had to be established by a preponderance of the evidence. Based on a post-trial sentencing hearing, the judge found by a preponderance of the evidence six aggravating facts, including the particular vulnerability of the victim, and one mitigating fact, that Cunningham had no record of prior criminal conduct. Concluding that the aggravators outweighed the sole mitigator, the judge sentenced Cunningham to the upper term of 16 years.
Following a line of recent precedents, the Supreme Court held that the DSL, by placing sentence-elevating fact finding within the judge's province, violated a defendant's right to trial by jury safeguarded by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments.
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