Cite as: 509 U. S. 602 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
After deciding to confine the benefits of the Self-Incrimination Clause of the Fifth Amendment to criminal proceedings, the Framers turned their attention to the Eighth Amendment. There were no proposals to limit that Amendment to criminal proceedings . . . ." 492 U. S., at 294. Section 10 of the English Bill of Rights of 1689 is not expressly limited to criminal cases either. The original draft of § 10 as introduced in the House of Commons did contain such a restriction, but only with respect to the bail clause: "The requiring excessive Bail of Persons committed in criminal Cases, and imposing excessive Fines, and illegal Punishments, to be prevented." 10 H. C. Jour. 17 (1688). The absence of any similar restriction in the other two clauses suggests that they were not limited to criminal cases. In the final version, even the reference to criminal cases in the bail clause was omitted. See 1 W. & M., 2d Sess., ch. 2, 3 Stat. at Large 441 (1689) ("That excessive Bail ought not to be required, nor excessive Fines imposed; nor cruel and unusual Punishments inflicted"); see also L. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689, p. 88 (1981) ("But article 10 contains no reference to 'criminal cases' and, thus, would seem to apply . . . to all cases").5
The purpose of the Eighth Amendment, putting the Bail Clause to one side, was to limit the government's power to punish. See Browning-Ferris, 492 U. S., at 266-267, 275. The Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause is self-evidently concerned with punishment. The Excessive Fines Clause limits the government's power to extract payments, whether
5 In Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U. S. 651 (1977), we concluded that the omission of any reference to criminal cases in § 10 was without substantive significance in light of the preservation of a similar reference to criminal cases in the preamble to the English Bill of Rights. Id., at 665. This reference in the preamble, however, related only to excessive bail. See 1 W. & M., 2d Sess., ch. 2, 3 Stat. at Large 440 (1689). Moreover, the preamble appears designed to catalog the misdeeds of James II, see ibid., rather than to define the scope of the substantive rights set out in subsequent sections.
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