Supreme's Strike CA's Sentencing Law

The U.S. Supreme Court today struck down the State of California's criminal sentencing scheme. See news article here. This will likely cause lots of scrambling in courts and district attorney's offices statewide in order to resentence many thousands of convicted felons to lesser terms in prison. Interesting note that Scalia and Thomas as well as the new Chief Justice Roberts were all in the 6-3 majority opinion. This is not a good day for the prosecution.
The Supreme Court's decision in Cunningham v. California now requires that any fact used in sentencing will need to be found true by a jury rather than by a judge. Up until now, the jury decides guilt of a particular charge, but the Judge was able to decide if there were certain 'aggravating factors' that would justify a lengthier prison sentence. As of today's decision, Judges hands are tied and only the Jury can make the additional findings of fact. This will lengthen and will complicate the jury trial process.
Judges always admonish juries not to consider the sentence when deliberating on guilt...but now, it will be more difficult to keep the jury focused on guilt, because they will also be asked to consider whether there were aggravating circumstances. It will be interesting to see how the California Legislature deals with this. As long as it takes to get legislation passed, it may be years before it is fully addressed.