558
Opinion of the Court
in a violation of the First Amendment. We reject this counterintuitive conclusion, which in effect would say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Petitioner also argues that the forfeiture order in this case—considered atop his 6-year prison term and $100,000 fine—is disproportionate to the gravity of his offenses and therefore violates the Eighth Amendment, either as a "cruel and unusual punishment" or as an "excessive fine." 3 Brief for Petitioner 40. The Court of Appeals, though, failed to distinguish between these two components of petitioner's Eighth Amendment challenge. Instead, the court lumped the two together, disposing of them both with the general statement that the Eighth Amendment does not require any proportionality review of a sentence less than life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. 943 F. 2d, at 836. But that statement has relevance only to the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments. Unlike the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, which is concerned with matters such as the duration or conditions of confinement, "[t]he Excessive Fines Clause limits the government's power to extract payments, whether in cash or in kind, as punishment for some offense." Austin v. United States, post, at 609-610 (emphasis and internal quotation marks omitted); accord, Browning-Ferris Industries of Vt., Inc. v. Kelco Disposal, Inc., 492 U. S. 257, 265 (1989) ("[A]t the time of the drafting and ratification of the [Eighth] Amendment, the word 'fine' was understood to mean a payment to a sovereign as punishment for some offense"); id., at 265, n. 6. The in personam criminal forfeiture at issue here is clearly a form of monetary punishment no different, for Eighth Amendment purposes, from a traditional "fine." Ac-3 This sense of disproportionality animates much of petitioner's First Amendment arguments as well. Questions of proportionality, however, should be dealt with directly and forthrightly under the Eighth Amendment and not be allowed to influence sub silentio courts' First Amendment analysis.
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