AT THE ALTAR OF THE APPELLATE GODS

Capable, sometimes rueful memoir of a crucial Supreme Court case.

As Gochman, a New Jersey prosecutor, writes, any lawyer who pledges to take a case all the way to the Supreme Court will find the odds stacked against that probability. “The justices are very persnickety about the issues they choose to tackle,” writes the author, and of the thousands of petitions that are filed, only about 80 ever make it to oral argument. In Gochman’s instance, she was assigned to argue a matter of legal technicality: “Who was required by the United States Constitution to determine whether a crime was racially motivated, the jury or the sentencing judge?” That question was central to the case of a defendant sentenced for shooting at a Black neighbor, with an extra two years imposed by the judge for committing a hate crime. The defendant sued on constitutional grounds, and the case dragged out for four years in the New Jersey judicial system. In 2000, Gochman had 20 minutes before the Supreme Court to argue that “if a trial judge can make factual findings that increase a defendant’s sentence from life imprisonment to death, then a trial judge can make factual findings that increase a defendant’s prison sentence by two years.” In the end, it will come as no spoiler to anyone familiar with Apprendi v. New Jersey to learn that Gochman did not prevail, as careful as her argument was. In a 5-4 decision, with hostility from Antonin Scalia and a deft dissection by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court ruled that such matters should be decided by a jury rather than a judge and proved beyond reasonable doubt. Since that ruling, the author writes, the court has issued more than 20 rulings involving her case. Generously, Gochman concludes in her blow-by-blow account, “I have wholeheartedly come to accept that [the case] was correctly decided.”

Legal-minded readers and SCOTUS watchers will enjoy the author’s account of her brief spell in the lion’s den.