Cite as: 509 U. S. 443 (1993)
Opinion of Kennedy, J.
damages award in deciding whether the award violates the Constitution. This type of review, far from imposing meaningful, law-like restraints on jury excess, could become as fickle as the process it is designed to superintend. Furthermore, it might give the illusion of judicial certainty where none in fact exists, and, in so doing, discourage legislative intervention that might prevent unjust punitive awards.
As I have suggested before, see id., at 41 (opinion concurring in judgment), a more manageable constitutional inquiry focuses not on the amount of money a jury awards in a particular case but on its reasons for doing so. The Constitution identifies no particular multiple of compensatory damages as an acceptable limit for punitive awards; it does not concern itself with dollar amounts, ratios, or the quirks of juries in specific jurisdictions. Rather, its fundamental guarantee is that the individual citizen may rest secure against arbitrary or irrational deprivations of property. When a punitive damages award reflects bias, passion, or prejudice on the part of the jury, rather than a rational concern for deterrence and retribution, the Constitution has been violated, no matter what the absolute or relative size of the award. Justice O'Connor is correct in observing that in implementing this principle, courts have often looked to the size of the award as one indication that it resulted from bias, passion, or prejudice, see post, at 476-478, but that is not the sole, or even necessarily the most important, sign. Other objective indicia of the type discussed by the plurality, see ante, at 455-457, as well as direct evidence from the trial record, are also helpful in ascertaining whether a jury stripped a party of its property in an arbitrary way and not in accordance with the standards of rationality and fairness the Constitution requires.
The plurality suggests that the jury in this case acted in conformance with these standards of rationality in large part on the basis of what it perceives to be the rational relation
467
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