With remarkable speed and an unusually strong push from the solicitor general's office, the sentencing mess wrought by the Supreme Court's Blakely v. Washington decision June 24 has returned to the high court's doorstep.
As early as today, the justices are expected to announce expedited review of at least one of several post-Blakely lower court rulings that present the issue of whether, and to what extent, federal sentencing guidelines are unconstitutional in light of Blakely. That ruling struck down a Washington state sentencing system -- similar to sentencing in more than a dozen states and at the federal level -- and requires that juries, not judges, determine any facts that increase a defendant's sentence.