In a case involving criminal sentencing, the Supreme Court proved again on Friday that the media narrative of a bench polluted by partisan agendas is blatantly untrue. Alas, while the ideological hodge-podge court applied the right principle in the case, it reached the wrong result.

First, let’s dispense with the ignorant leftist narrative. It posits that the court is a partisan or ideological battleground where the six Republican-appointed justices impose extremist conservative decisions on the country over the objections of Democrat-appointed Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Or, that five conservatives do so, while Chief Justice John Roberts plays umpire by occasionally siding with the liberals but usually joining the conservatives, albeit on narrower grounds.

Nonsense. Of 47 cases decided this term so far, only five have produced dissents by, and only by, the three Democratic appointees. Not a single one so far has produced a 5-4 split, with only Roberts leaving the Republican reservation. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch both have been on the “losing” side more often than any of the three Democrats. In sum, there is no partisan or ideological agenda.

By the liberal media narrative, the criminal sentencing case, Erlinger v. United States, looks like one of the most likely to create a 6-3 conservative-liberal split. The narrative holds that the conservatives are determined to crack down on crime, even at the expense of the constitutional assurances of fair procedures that liberal justices uphold. The conservatives are portrayed as ruthless, while the liberals are credited with protecting “the little guy” from rogue police and prosecutors.

Erlinger is just the latest case showing that, even on defendants’ rights cases, the narrative is bunk. The majority opinion, essentially in favor of the defendant, was written by Gorsuch, joined by Thomas, Roberts, conservative Amy Coney Barrett, and liberals Kagan and Sotomayor. The three dissenters were Republican appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito and reputationally hard-liberal Jackson. Yes, Jackson would have allowed an enhanced sentence to stand, while Thomas and Gorsuch would at least temporarily void it.

Hmmm… Maybe, just maybe, the justices are actually doing their best to apply laws to disputed circumstances rather than just engaging in ideological cage matches.

In this case, the court’s majority decided that the Constitution’s various guarantees of trial by jury require that juries, not judges, are required to determine any “fact” relevant to criminal sentencing. Here, lower courts had made the defendant subject to a significantly longer sentence because he was a multiple-time violent offender. His appeal argued that no jury had newly ascertained that three of his prior offenses had been “committed on occasions different from one another,” which is what is required for the enhanced sentence to kick in. Instead, a judge, looking at the record, determined that the offenses had occurred on different occasions.

Here’s where the court majority needlessly complicated a straightforward issue. They did so for the best of reasons: Earlier court precedent (with which I wholeheartedly agree) confirmed the principle that the Constitution’s trial-by-jury requirement means that a judge on his own cannot enhance a criminal sentence by reliance on alleged “facts” that the jury didn’t consider.

The majority, however, carried that precedent to an absurd length. The main earlier precedent, Apprendi v. New Jersey in 2000, involved an enhancement of a sentence for something legitimately in dispute, namely whether the simple crime in that case was also a hate crime. As no jury had examined evidence on that front, the Supreme Court threw out that sentence enhancement.

Here, though, the court treated the “separate occasion” requirement as if it were something a jury would need to decide as well. That’s preposterous. Apprendi applied to alleged “facts” legitimately in dispute, not to basic realities of an indisputable nature.

Think of it this way: If somebody is charged with illegally waterboarding someone else, it doesn’t take a jury to decide that a liquid consisting of two hydrogen atoms for each oxygen item is indeed “water” for purposes of the anti-waterboarding statute. That’s not a determinable fact, legally speaking; it’s just a straightforward definition of water.

Likewise, with regard to what constitutes three separate “occasions.” If a ruffian goes on a vandalism spree and breaks the windows of three storefronts in the same block in the same hour, perhaps that amounts to a single occasion. Erlinger, though, committed burglary against one restaurant on April 4, 1991, against a sporting goods store on April 8 of that year, and against another restaurant on April 11. He argued that those three separate incidents, for each of which a jury found him guilty, somehow amounted to a single “episode.” In turn, somehow, he argued that an “episode” is the same as an “occasion.”

Courts are supposed to apply plain language unless applying complicated legal terms of art. In the Supreme Court’s own “rules or statutory construction and interpretation,” the very first sentence says, “the law should be given its plain meaning wherever possible.” There is not a single legitimate definition of “occasion” that would allow three different events, each of them days apart, each in different places, to be considered the same “occasion.” This is not a “fact” that needs adjudicating; it’s a simple definition of the word “occasion.”

“Occasion” is not a legal term of art, decipherable only by consulting Black’s Law Dictionary. To even suggest otherwise is, well, hogwash. Just as waterboarding is by nature premised on the undeniable reality that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, it is an undeniable reality that what happens at a sporting goods store one day is a different occasion from what happens at a restaurant three days later.

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An interference call on one NFL Sunday is a different occasion than an interference call two weeks later. An overcooked meal on a Tuesday is a different occasion than an overcooked meal on a Saturday.

Yes, the constitutional principle absolutely holds that a jury, not a judge, must decide the accuracy of contestable facts. But six justices here were so intent on defending this principle that they took it to farcical lengths. As Justice Kavanaugh noted in dissent, all 12 federal courts of appeals have agreed that judges can determine that a separate occasion is indeed a separate occasion without needing 12 jurors to confirm the obvious. This isn’t a judgment call but a definition. No amount of legal sophism can erase that absolute reality. The court got this case badly wrong.