ASHINGTON, Oct. 20 — The Supreme Court significantly broadened its continuing examination of the role of judges and juries in criminal sentencing when it agreed on Monday to decide whether judges alone can impose sentences greater than the normal range provided under state guideline laws.

The new case, a challenge to the application of sentencing guidelines in Washington State, presents a logical follow-up question to a death-penalty case from Arizona that the court decided last year. In that decision, Ring v. Arizona, the court held that juries, and not judges, must find the "aggravating" factors that make a defendant eligible for death row.

The question is whether the Ring decision can be limited to the death penalty. While ostensibly about the state systems, the new case, Blakely v. Washington, No. 02-1632, also raises questions about federal sentencing guidelines, which differ from those of the states in important respects. But the federal guidelines may suffer from a similar constitutional vulnerability if the court decides the principle in the Ring decision applies to noncapital sentences.

Washington and a growing number of other states use a guidelines system to provide a measure of statewide uniformity and predictability in sentencing. Under the system, grids take account of the details and circumstances of the offense, and produce a sentencing range that a judge may depart from only for "substantial and compelling reasons." A separate law sets maximum sentences for categories of crimes. These maximums are higher than the top sentences of the guidelines. This case concerns the zone between the top of the guideline range and the statutory maximum.

Under the laws of Washington and at least 10 other states that use guidelines, judges have the authority to increase the sentence, up to the statutory maximum, for a variety of reasons. In this case, a judge sentenced Ralph H. Blakely Jr. to 90 months in prison for kidnapping his wife.

As a class B felony, kidnapping could result in a maximum sentence of 120 months. The circumstances of Mr. Blakely's crime produced a guidelines sentence of 53 months. The judge imposed the extra 37 months after finding that domestic violence and deliberate cruelty were added factors in the crime. Following state law, the trial judge made that determination after holding a special sentencing hearing at which the standard of proof was a "preponderance of the evidence" rather than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard required to find guilt.

The Washington State Court of Appeals rejected Mr. Blakely's arguments that only a jury could make the extra sentencing findings, and that the standard had to be beyond a reasonable doubt.

His appeal opens the latest chapter in a far-reaching debate over criminal sentencing that began in 2000 with the Supreme Court's unexpected decision in Apprendi v. New Jersey. That ruling struck down the state's hate-crime statute, under which a judge could add extra time to a sentence on finding that the crime was committed with a biased motive. The court ruled that under the Sixth Amendment's right of trial by jury, "any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt."

Since the Apprendi ruling, states have been defending their sentencing guideline laws on the ground that the Apprendi principle is not violated by adding extra time to a guidelines sentence as long as the judge stays within the statutory maximum.

But Mr. Blakely, supported in his appeal by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, is arguing that the Apprendi ruling does apply because it is only by finding additional factors, of the sort the Supreme Court said must be determined by a jury, that a judge can exceed the top sentence of the guidelines.

Though accepting this case, the court somewhat surprisingly turned down an appeal by an inmate on death row in Alabama that raised a related question: whether the jury's role involves deciding only if an aggravating factor makes a defendant eligible for the death penalty, as in the Ring decision, or whether the jury must decide also if aggravating factors outweigh mitigating ones.

Alabama, like several other states, lets judges perform this "weighing" function, and there is a vigorous debate in the state and federal courts over whether this is still allowed under the Ring decision. Since the new term began, the court has turned down three cases raising this question, including the case today, Waldrop v. Alabama, No. 03-5412.

These were among the day's other developments at the court:

Giving Names to the Police

The court agreed to decide whether people can be required to identify themselves to the police when officers lack probable cause to suspect them of a crime.

The state and lower federal courts have been wrestling for years with this question. The justices agreed to use an appeal filed by the Nevada state public defender's office on behalf of Larry D. Hiibel, who was convicted of resisting an officer by refusing to give his name when a sheriff's deputy stopped him near his car on the basis of a witness's report that he had been fighting with a female passenger.

Mr. Hiibel placed his hands behind his back and invited the deputy to arrest him, but he refused to produce identification. There is no doubt in the case, Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, No. 03-5554, that while the deputy had "reasonable suspicion" to justify a brief detention to check out the report, he lacked probable cause to suspect him of a crime.

The Nevada courts upheld his misdemeanor conviction for resisting the officer, rejecting the argument that Mr. Hiibel had a right to refuse to identify himself under the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable seizures and the Fifth Amendment's protection against compelled self-incrimination.

The state urged the justices to uphold the conviction. The Nevada brief said: "Society is not prepared to recognize that a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in their name when being lawfully detained by an officer."

The appeal filed on behalf of Mr. Hiibel said: "This issue goes to the very nature of the kind of society in which we wish to live: it is inimical to a free society that mere silence can lead to imprisonment."

Executing Juveniles

Without comment, the court turned down the most recent challenge to the execution of those who committed their crimes before the age of 18. The appeal was filed on behalf of Nanon McKewn Williams, a Texas inmate who was sentenced to death for a murder when he was 17. The appeal, Williams v. Texas, No. 03-5956, argued that trends in state legislatures and around the world indicated a need for the justices to revisit the issue for the first time since 1989, when the court upheld death sentences for juveniles.