Hudson County Criminal Lawyer Blog
The New Jersey Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in State v. Jamel Carlton that has immediate and far-reaching consequences for how extended-term sentences are sought and challenged across the state. At its core, the Court held that a constitutional error occurred when a judge, rather than a jury, made the factual findings required to sentence Carlton as a persistent offender under N.J.S.A. 2C:44-3(a). But the Court did not stop there. It went on to hold that such an error is subject to harmless error review, and that under the specific facts of Carlton’s case, the error was indeed harmless. For criminal defense attorneys and prosecutors working in Hudson, Essex, Union, Passaic, and counties throughout New Jersey, the decision raises important questions about pending cases, ongoing sentencing proceedings, and the long-term viability of the persistent offender statute as it currently reads.
The background of the case is straightforward. Jamel Carlton was convicted after a jury trial of first-degree aggravated sexual assault, burglary, and related offenses. At sentencing, the State moved to have him sentenced as a persistent offender based on two prior New York convictions such as a third-degree robbery from 2007 and a fourth-degree possession of stolen property from 2011. The trial judge, not a jury, made the factual findings establishing Carlton’s persistent offender status and imposed an aggregate forty-two-year term subject to the No Early Release Act. While Carlton’s appeal was pending, the United States Supreme Court decided Erlinger v. United States, 602 U.S. 821 (2024), which held that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments require a unanimous jury, not a judge, to determine whether a defendant’s prior offenses were committed on separate occasions when those findings increase sentencing exposure. Both the State and Carlton agreed that his sentence was unconstitutional under Erlinger.
The constitutional backdrop matters here, and the New Jersey Supreme Court traced it carefully. The line of cases from Apprendi v. New Jersey through Blakely v. Washington and into Erlinger stands for a consistent proposition: any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury and proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Erlinger extended that logic directly to the persistent-offender context, rejecting the government’s argument that the narrow “prior conviction” exception established in Almendarez-Torres allowed a judge to resolve the surrounding factual questions such as whether the prior offenses were committed on different occasions. The New Jersey Supreme Court made clear that Erlinger abrogated the Court’s own earlier holding in State v. Pierce, which had permitted judges to make exactly those findings.
In State v. Juan C. Hernandez-Peralta (decided July 22, 2025), the New Jersey Supreme Court answered a practical question that comes up all the time in criminal practice: how far does a defense lawyer have to go to investigate a client’s immigration status? The Court held that, on the facts of this case, sentencing counsel was not constitutionally ineffective for asking, “Are you a U.S. citizen?”, getting a clear “yes”, and relying on that answer, even though the client later turned out to be a noncitizen who faced deportation.
