Word: sixth
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...part of it was from a clash with the prevailing culture of college itself. As your study group sits in a dining hall, slogging through the sixth of eight absurd quantum chemistry problems at 4 o’clock on a Friday morning—trying to remember how to complete the square within an exponent inside an integrand so you can solve the damned integral already—the two most depressing sights are, one, the inevitably ravaged state of brain break, and two, tipsy classmates coming back from lord-knows-where in search of the same non-existent...
...they did, sending an uncoxed four and a freshman four to the Grand Finals of the IRAs, both of which placed sixth...
...just because the judge believed the crime was racially motivated. Unless the facts leading to the sentence are determined by a jury (or admitted to in a guilty plea), the court said, a judge required to impose a sentence longer than "the prescribed statutory maximum" violates the defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial...
...Supreme Court returned to the issue four years later in Blakely v. Washington. This time, the justices decided, also by a 5-4 vote, that Washington State's sentencing rules violated a kidnapper's Sixth Amendment right. Since the judge determined that the kidnapper had acted with "deliberate cruelty," the rules allowed the judge to add 37 months to the 53-month sentence. Even though 53 months was far below the "statutory maximum" of 10 years, the sentence was still unconstitutional, a conclusion that suggested the federal guidelines, which operated in a similar way, were in jeopardy...
...federal guidelines also violate the right to a jury trial, but the constitutional fix is to make the guidelines optional. So a judge can use his traditional discretion to determine sentences, while consulting the guidelines, and so long as the sentences are reasonable, they won't violate the Sixth Amendment...