Cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court typically cut a wide swath of relevance and applicability, and a 5-4 Court ruling issued this Monday that addressed mandatory minimum sentencing is certainly no different.
In summary, the Court engaged in a major sentencing reform by overruling a decade-old case it had authored in 2002 and recommitted to what one commentator termed “a straightforward but hard-fought extension of the so-called Apprendi rule.”



