St. Louis ? The Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a St. Louis Rams defensive lineman’s request to have a felony drunken-driving charge thrown out, declining comment on Leonard Little’s claim that the law behind the count was unconstitutional.

Little’s attorneys had argued that under Missouri law, a jury — not as a judge has done — should have decided whether Little was a persistent offender, given his previous conviction in a 1998 drunken-driving wreck that killed a woman.

The prosecutor, Mark Bishop, countered in legal filings that a St. Louis County judge and the Missouri Court of Appeals have rejected Little’s claims, and that Missouri’s high court should do the same.

Among other things, Little argued that U.S. Supreme Court rulings since 2000 relating to a defendant’s constitutional right to a jury trial applied in his case.

A Supreme Court ruling four years ago, hardly noticed at the time, overturned state sentencing rules in New Jersey that allowed a judge to lengthen a criminal sentence based on facts never presented to a jury. The court said then, and has repeated in other cases since, that the Constitution’s guarantee of a jury trial meant that judges alone could not do the work of juries.

In June, the nation’s high court, in a 5-4 ruling, held in a Washington state case that juries must decide any matter that can lengthen a sentence beyond the maximum set out in state sentencing guidelines. To do otherwise violates a defendant’s right to a jury trial, the court majority said.