Argument of Speaker
Mr. Speaker: The opinion of the Court in No. 99-658, Castillo against United States will be announced by Justice Breyer.
Argument of Justice Breyer
Mr. Breyer: This case focuses on a federal criminal statute that prohibits the use or carrying of a “firearm” during or in relation to a crime of violence.
The statute says that in addition to the punishment provided for the underlying crime of violence the offender “shall be sentenced to imprisonment for five years if he uses or carries a firearm", then it adds, "and if the firearm is a machinegun, to imprisonment for 30 years."
The question is whether that statutory word “machinegun” or various other kinds of specifically listed firearm types, whether it designates a separate crime in which case the government has to charge the element machinegun in an indictment and prove it to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, or whether it simply sets forth a sentencing factor i.e. a reason for increasing the sentence which a judge not the jury would determine.
We recently considered similar questions involving other statutes in cases called Jones v. United States and Almendarez-Torres v. United States, both of which involved discussions of statutory interpretation as well as Congress’ power under the constitution to permit judges rather than juries to determine particular factual matters.
In this case however we do not invoke the constitutional principles rather we simply use traditional tools of statutory analysis considering language, structure, context, and history of the statute along with such other factors as typically help a court to determine what Congress’ intent was, and we conclude that Congress intended the factual matter at issue whether, what the offender used was a machinegun, but it intended that to be an element of a separate crime, not the sentencing factor.
That being so where the government seeks the mandatory 20 or 30-year prison sentences prescribed by the statute for certain firearm types the government has to charge the type of firearm as an element in the indictment and prove it to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
We reverse the judgment of the Federal Court of Appeals below which had reached the different conclusions.
We explained all this in considerably greater detail in our opinion, and except for the discussion of legislative history which appears in part two of the opinion which Justice Scalia does not join; with that exception our decision is unanimous.
