488
Opinion of the Court
Rejecting Almendarez-Torres' objection, we concluded that sentencing him to a term higher than that attached to the offense alleged in the indictment did not violate the strictures of Winship in that case. Because Almendarez-Torres had admitted the three earlier convictions for aggravated felonies—all of which had been entered pursuant to proceedings with substantial procedural safeguards of their own— no question concerning the right to a jury trial or the standard of proof that would apply to a contested issue of fact was before the Court. Although our conclusion in that case was based in part on our application of the criteria we had invoked in McMillan, the specific question decided concerned the sufficiency of the indictment. More important, as Jones made crystal clear, 526 U. S., at 248-249, our conclusion in Almendarez-Torres turned heavily upon the fact that the additional sentence to which the defendant was subject was "the prior commission of a serious crime." 523 U. S., at 230; see also id., at 243 (explaining that "recidivism . . . is a traditional, if not the most traditional, basis for a sentencing court's increasing an offender's sentence"); id., at 244 (emphasizing "the fact that recidivism 'does not relate to the commission of the offense . . .' "); Jones, 526 U. S., at 249-250, n. 10 ("The majority and the dissenters in AlmendarezTorres disagreed over the legitimacy of the Court's decision to restrict its holding to recidivism, but both sides agreed that the Court had done just that"). Both the certainty that procedural safeguards attached to any "fact" of prior conviction, and the reality that Almendarez-Torres did not challenge the accuracy of that "fact" in his case, mitigated the due process and Sixth Amendment concerns otherwise implicated in allowing a judge to determine a "fact" increasing punishment beyond the maximum of the statutory range.14
14 The principal dissent's contention that our decision in Monge v. California, 524 U. S. 721 (1998), "demonstrates that Almendarez-Torres was" something other than a limited exception to the jury trial rule is both
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