In United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), the defendant was convicted of possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine. 543 U.S. at 226. The facts found by the jury mandated a base range of 210 to 262 months imprisonment under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines ("the Guidelines"). Id. The trial judge could not exceed that range without undertaking additional fact finding. Id. The trial judge found by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant possessed an amount of drugs in excess of the amount determined by the jury's verdict and sentenced the defendant to 360 months imprisonment, in accordance with a higher Guidelines range. Id. The Court held the sentence unconstitutional under the Sixth Amendment. Id. at 232. The Court, however, acknowledged that the trial judge's sentence would be constitutional if the Guidelines were advisory: If the Guidelines as currently written could be read as merely advisory provisions that recommended, rather than required, the selection of particular sentences in response to differing sets of facts, their use would not implicate the Sixth Amendment. We have never doubted the authority of a judge to exercise broad discretion in imposing a sentence within a statutory range. Indeed, everyone agrees that the constitutional issues presented by these cases would have been avoided entirely if Congress had omitted from the federal Sentencing Reform Act the provisions that make the Guidelines binding on district judges . . . . For when a trial judge exercises his discretion to select a specific sentence within a defined range, the defendant has no right to a jury determination of the facts that the judge deems relevant. Id. at 233 . Thus, the Court held that facts prompting an elevated sentence under the then-mandatory Guidelines must be submitted to a jury and proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Id. at 244. The Court held the federal sentencing guidelines violated the right to a jury trial by allowing the court to impose sentence enhancements based on its own factfinding, and severed the guideline provisions that made them mandatory. (Id. at pp. 226-227.) It rejected the contention the sentencing guidelines, promulgated by a commission, set no "statutory" maximum punishments at all. (Id. at pp. 237-238.) "The simple answer, of course, is that we were only considering a statute in Apprendi v. New Jersey. It was therefore appropriate to state the rule in that case in terms of a 'statutory maximum' ... ." (Id. at p. 238.) The court emphasized, "More important than the language used in our holding in Apprendi are the principles we sought to vindicate" (id. at p. 238), such as avoiding " 'arbitrary punishments upon arbitrary convictions' without the benefit of a jury' " (id. at pp. 238-239).