Admittedly I'm not a lawyer, so you may need to walk a littler slower with me, but what I see is this.
Posted by
ty97
Jun 4 '09, 20:07
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"The Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment required a jury to decide, beyond a reasonable doubt, any fact that increased the sentence of a defendant in a federal criminal case over the high end of the range provided by the Federal Sentencing Guidelines."
"The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are rules that set out a uniform sentencing policy for convicted felons in the United States federal courts system."
Which I believe means that Federal Sentencing Guidelines don't apply to state laws (is that accurate?). If so, then this ruling would still apply the states, but only to the extent that in order for punishement for a crime to exceed the statutory maximums (defined at the state level in this case) the jury would have to decide that hate applied.
But, the states could get around this by simply defining a different class of crime with higher sentencing maximums, could they not? Then they'd be within their statutory maximums.
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