Cite as: 532 U. S. 451 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
of its construction of the State's criminal trespass statute to the petitioners in that case. The statute prohibited "entry upon the lands of another . . . after notice from the owner or tenant prohibiting such entry . . . ." 378 U. S., at 349, n. 1 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). The South Carolina court construed the statute to extend to patrons of a drug store who had received no notice prohibiting their entry into the store, but had refused to leave the store when asked. Prior to the court's decision, South Carolina cases construing the statute had uniformly held that conviction under the statute required proof of notice before entry. None of those cases, moreover, had given the "slightest indication that that requirement could be satisfied by proof of the different act of remaining on the land after being told to leave." Id., at 357.
We held that the South Carolina court's retroactive application of its construction to the store patrons violated due process. Reviewing decisions in which we had held criminal statutes "void for vagueness" under the Due Process Clause, we noted that this Court has often recognized the "basic principle that a criminal statute must give fair warning of the conduct that it makes a crime." Id., at 350; see id., at 350-352 (discussing, inter alia, United States v. Harriss, 347 U. S. 612 (1954), Lanzetta v. New Jersey, 306 U. S. 451 (1939), and Connally v. General Constr. Co., 269 U. S. 385 (1926)). Deprivation of the right to fair warning, we continued, can result both from vague statutory language and from an un-foreseeable and retroactive judicial expansion of statutory language that appears narrow and precise on its face. Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U. S., at 352. For that reason, we concluded that "[i]f a judicial construction of a criminal statute is 'unexpected and indefensible by reference to the law which had been expressed prior to the conduct in issue,' [the construction] must not be given retroactive effect." Id., at 354 (quoting J. Hall, General Principles of Criminal Law 61 (2d ed. 1960)). We found that the South
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