Cite as: 518 U. S. 322 (1996)
Stevens, J., dissenting
what was equivalent to a serious offense and was [therefore] entitled to a jury trial." 418 U. S., at 517 (emphasis added).*
Justice Kennedy reads a second contempt case, Taylor v. Hayes, 418 U. S. 488 (1974), as standing for the proposition that a judge may defeat the jury trial right by promising a short sentence. He is mistaken. The dispositive fact in Taylor was not that the prison term imposed was only six months but rather that the actual sentence, acting as a proxy for the legislative judgment, demonstrated that "the State itself has determined that the contempt is not so serious as to warrant more than a six-month sentence." Id., at 496. In this case, by contrast, we have an explicit statutory expression of the legislative judgment that this prosecution is serious—the two offenses charged are punishable by a maximum prison sentence of 12 months.
All agree that a judge may not strip a defendant of the right to a jury trial for a serious crime by promising a sentence of six months or less. This is so because "[o]pprobrium attaches to conviction of those crimes regardless of the length of the actual sentence imposed," ante, at 334 (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment). In my view, the same rule must apply to prosecutions involving multiple offenses which are serious by virtue of their aggregate possible sentence. I see no basis for assuming that the dishonor associated with multiple convictions for petty offenses is less than the dishonor associated with conviction of a single serious crime. Because the right attaches at the moment of prosecution, a judge may not deprive a defendant of a jury trial by making a pretrial determination that the crimes charged will not warrant a sentence exceeding six months.
*The majority's speculation that the Court's holding in Codispoti was limited to criminal contempt cases, ante, at 328-329, is persuasively answered by Justice Kennedy. See ante, at 333-334 (opinion concurring in judgment).
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