Trial Right Bars Enhanced Mandatory Minimum, Appeals Court Says

A federal trial judge rightly declined to impose an enhanced mandatory minimum sentence following drug-related convictions, a split Eighth Circuit panel ruled.

Under the Sixth Amendment, a jury must find incarceration-related facts before the enhanced minimum can be applied, but that’s not possible in Antonio Evans’s case because of its peculiar procedural posture, the US Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit said Tuesday.

Evans and the prosecution both asked the district court to submit the incarcerated-related facts to the jury, but it didn’t, according to the decision. After his convictions in 2024, the US Supreme Court decided Erlinger ...