340
Stevens, J., dissenting
I do not quarrel with the established view that only defendants whose alleged misconduct is deemed serious by the legislature are entitled to be judged by a jury. But in my opinion, the legislature's determination of the severity of the charges against a defendant is properly measured by the maximum sentence authorized for the prosecution as a whole. The text of the Sixth Amendment supports this interpretation by referring expressly to "criminal prosecutions."
Nothing in our prior precedents conflicts with this view. True, some of our past cases (the ones on which the majority relies) have referred to an "offense" rather than a "prosecution." See, e. g., Blanton v. North Las Vegas, 489 U. S. 538, 541 (1989); Frank v. United States, 395 U. S. 147, 148 (1969). But the words were effectively interchangeable in those cases because the prosecutions at issue concerned only one offense. The contempt cases, which do involve multiple offenses, demonstrate that aggregation—that is, deciding whether the defendant has a right to a jury trial on the basis of the prosecution rather than the individual offenses—is appropriate.
The majority attempts to distinguish Codispoti v. Pennsylvania, 418 U. S. 506 (1974), by suggesting that the Court's decision in that case turned on the absence of any statutory measure of severity. Ante, at 328. That observation is certainly correct to a point: The contempt cases are special because the sentence actually imposed provides the only available yardstick by which to judge compliance with the command of the Sixth Amendment. But that unique aspect of the cases does not speak to the aggregation question. Having determined that the defendants in Codispoti were sentenced to no more than six months for any individual contempt, it would follow from the rule the Court announces today that a jury trial was unnecessary. Yet we reversed and remanded, holding that "each contemnor was tried for
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