Last week the Connecticut Supreme Court released its decision in State v. Langston, holding that a trial court, when sentencing a defendant for a crime of which he was convicted, could consider the conduct underlying a charge of which he was acquitted, if it found, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the defendant had committed the crime, notwithstanding his acquittal of that charge. In rejecting the defendant’s claim that the sentencing court’s consideration of the conduct underlying the assault charge of which he was acquitted violated his federal and state constitutional rights to due process and to a trial by jury, the court relied upon U.S. v. Watts, and its own earlier decision State v. Huey.
In State v. Huey, the Supreme Court emphasized the broad discretion a sentencing court has to consider matters that, although not admissible at trial, had some minimal indicium of reliability. In Huey, the court determined that ‘‘[i]t is a fundamental sentencing principle that a sentencing judge may appropriately conduct an inquiry broad in scope, and largely unlimited either as to the kind of information he may consider or the source from which it may come.”
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