Did the Supreme Court nullify zero tolerance punishments?
In January of this year the Supreme Court issued an opinion in the case of United States v. Booker. The Court found that mandatory sentencing guidelines were unconstitutional as they violate the precepts of the 6th amendment.
Zero Tolerance punishments are mandatory sentencing guidelines implemented by institutions of the state. Is this a mortal blow for ZT? I am eagerly awaiting the first ZT punishment being overturned by a court due to US v Booker.
i thought that you would have realized by now schools are veto from logic. so folwoing that logic this only makes zt stronger. now my brain hurts which is typical of what hapens when i try to understand schools
The answer is “probably not”.
Given that these punishments are not, in and of themselves, criminal penalties, and given that schools do retain a lot of “in loco parentis” power, it is unlikely that ZT punishments would be seen as a violation of the utterly absurd majority opinion in Bowers.
Probably the only thing Bowers would touch would be punishments for some of the “criminalized” disciplinary issues — which are not, technically, applied by the school at all.
The question presented in Booker — and before that, in Blakely — was not whether the Government could impose harsh, mandatory punishments.
Rather, the question was whether a judge could sentence a defendant based on facts not submitted to a jury. In Mr. Booker’s case, for example, he was convicted of possessing 50 grams of cocaine; but the judge sentenced him for possession of 92.5 grams. Under the (then-mandatory) Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the more cocaine a defendant possessed, the longer his prison term.
The Supreme Court didn’t have a problem with Mr. Booker’s prison term per se, or with mandatory sentences generally. Rather, the Court said that Congress could not mandate that Mr. Booker be sentenced for 92.5 grams when the jury had convicted him of possessing only 50 grams. Or, to put it another way, Mr. Booker could have received the longer prison term for possession of 92.5 grams, but only if that fact was first submitted to a jury.
In the case of zero tolerance, students aren’t being “convicted” of one thing and then punished for something else, which is the practice to which the Supreme Court was objecting. Rather, the students are just being punished harshly for the thing they did. Harsh punishments don’t run afoul of Booker.