234
Opinion of the Court
code, which genuinely stand on their own grammatical feet thanks to phrases such as "shall be unlawful," see, e. g., 18 U. S. C. § 922(g), "shall be punished," see, e. g., § 511A(a), or "shall be guilty of," see, e. g., 18 U. S. C. § 514 (1994 ed., Supp. II), which draw a provision to its close. Second, as for the significance of the word "shall," although it frequently separates offense-defining clauses from sentencing provisions, it hardly does so invariably. One of the robbery statutes that served as a model for § 2119,3 see 18 U. S. C. §§ 2118(a)(3), (b)(3), for example, places elements of the offense on either side of "shall." And, of course, where the supposedly "elements" side is itself grammatically incomplete (as here), the placement of "shall" is oddly equivocal. Indeed, both the Government and the Courts of Appeals treat the statute perhaps most closely resembling this one, § 1365(a) (consumer tampering), as defining basic and aggravated offenses, one of which is defined in terms of serious bodily injury. See, e. g., United States v. Meling, 47 F. 3d 1546, 1551 (CA9 1995).
These clues derived from attention to structure and parsing of wording, like those the dissent holds up to distinguish the carjacking act both from the robbery statutes upon which it was modeled and state aggravated robbery statutes, see post, at 260-262, 263-264 (opinion of Kennedy, J.), turn out to move us only so far in our effort to infer congressional intent. The text alone does not justify any confident inference. But statutory drafting occurs against a backdrop not merely of structural conventions of varying significance, but of traditional treatment of certain categories of important facts, like the degree of injury to victims of crime, in relation to particular crimes. If a given statute is unclear about treating such a fact as element or penalty aggravator, it makes sense to look at what other statutes have done, on the fair assumption that Congress is unlikely to intend any radical departures from past practice without making a point of saying so.
3 See n. 4, infra.
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