482
Opinion of the Court
sentence imposed by a federal district judge, if within statutory limits, is generally not subject to review" (emphasis added)); Williams, 337 U. S., at 246, 247 (explaining that, in contrast to the guilt stage of trial, the judge's task in sentencing is to determine, "within fixed statutory or constitutional limits[,] the type and extent of punishment after the issue of guilt" has been resolved).9
The historic link between verdict and judgment and the consistent limitation on judges' discretion to operate within the limits of the legal penalties provided highlight the novelty of a legislative scheme that removes the jury from
9 See also 1 J. Bishop, Criminal Law §§ 933-934(1) (9th ed. 1923) ("With us legislation ordinarily fixes the penalties for the common law offences equally with the statutory ones. . . . Under the common-law procedure, the court determines in each case what within the limits of the law shall be the punishment,—the question being one of discretion" (emphasis added)); id., § 948 ("[I]f the law has given the court a discretion as to the punishment, it will look in pronouncing sentence into any evidence proper to influence a judicious magistrate to make it heavier or lighter, yet not to exceed the limits fixed for what of crime is within the allegation and the verdict. Or this sort of evidence may be placed before the jury at the trial, if it has the power to assess the punishment. But in such a case the aggravating matter must not be of a crime separate from the one charged in the indictment,—a rule not applicable where a delinquent offence under an habitual criminal act is involved" (footnotes omitted)).
The principal dissent's discussion of Williams, post, at 545-546, 547, fails to acknowledge the significance of the Court's caveat that judges' discretion is constrained by the "limits fixed by law." Nothing in Williams implies that a judge may impose a more severe sentence than the maximum authorized by the facts found by the jury. Indeed, the commentators cited in the dissent recognize precisely this same limitation. See post, at 544-545 (quoting K. Stith & J. Cabranes, Fear of Judging: Sentencing Guidelines in the Federal Courts 9 (1998) ("From the beginning of the Republic, federal judges were entrusted with wide sentencing discretion . . . , permitting the sentencing judge to impose any term of imprisonment and any fine up to the statutory maximum" (emphasis added)); Lynch, Towards A Model Penal Code, Second (Federal?), 2 Buffalo Crim. L. Rev. 297, 320 (1998) (noting that judges in discretionary sentencing took account of facts relevant to a particular offense "within the spectrum of conduct covered by the statute of conviction")).
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