Hawaiian sentencing law

… and speaking of Hawaii, guess what they have besides sunny beaches, volcanoes, the ocean and clean air? They’ve got new sentencing law statutes!

Hawaii’s been a bit slow catching up to the rest of us with sentencing enhancements, according to an editorial in the October 27th. Honolulu Star-Bulletin. But that was then, and, thanks to a special session of their legislature, all that changed Wednesday.

In February, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the judgment of the Hawaiian Supreme Court in a case involving a defendant who had been convicted of 22 felonies alleged in five separate indictments, including one count of attempted second degree murder. The case was remanded back down to the state high court for reconsideration “in light of Cunningham v. California,” a case dealing with the upward enhancement of a defendant tried & convicted of sexual child abuse in 2006, in which the Supreme Court found that “placing sentence-elevating factfinding in the judge’s province violates a defendant’s right to trial by jury safeguards.”

Earlier this month, the Hawaiian Supreme Court on that remand returned a holding that the state’s statutes governing extended term sentencing were unconstitutional because they required a judge, rather than a jury, find facts other than prior or concurrent convictions needed for proper enhancements in light of federal standards. The Court declined to exercise its authority, however, to order that a jury be empanelled to find those facts necessary to impose an extended term of imprisonment, because, it said, when the legislature had previously tried to conform to extended term sentencing schemes to requirements being set by the U.S. Supreme Court, it had not vested in juries the power to find the requisite facts, directing that the court retain that responsibility.

(The case, by the way, Hawaii v. Maugaotega, was remanded to the original circuit court for non-extended term sentencing.)


What’s any of this got to do with Ohio courts?

In its remand of Maugaotega, the Hawaiian Supreme Court noted that State ex. rel. Mason v. Griffin, in Ohio in 2004, “concluded that, in light of constitutional reasons unique to Ohio, and statutory language similar to Hawaii’s requiring a court, not a jury, find aggravating factors for an extended sentence, the trial court ‘patently and unambiguously lacks jurisdiction to hold a jury sentencing hearing’ and granting a writ of prohibition.”

Mason was overruled in part by State v. Hines last June, but the pertinent parts here were not of that overruling. In fact, the Ohio Supreme Court in Hine summarizes Ohio’s enhancement remake by saying “When (State v. Foster) was decided, the Supreme Court went to great lengths to fashion an appropriate remedy, ultimately holding that severance was the only applicable remedy. Any question left unresolved in Griffen was answered in Foster, which did not limit courts to the lowest sentence or concurrent sentences.”