Cite as: 509 U. S. 688 (1993)
Opinion of White, J.
Victims, understandably, would prefer to have access to a proceeding in which swift and expeditious punishment could be inflicted for that offense without prejudice to a subsequent full-blown criminal trial. The justification for such a system, however, has nothing to do with preventing disruption of a court's proceedings or even with vindicating its authority. While, under the principle of necessity, contempt proceedings have been exempted from some constitutional constraints, this was done strictly "to secure judicial authority from obstruction in the performance of its duties to the end that means appropriate for the preservation and enforcement of the Constitution may be secured." Ex parte Hudgings, 249 U. S. 378, 383 (1919). No such end being invoked here, the principle of necessity cannot be summoned for the sole purpose of letting contempt proceedings achieve what, under our Constitution, other criminal trials cannot.
II
If, as the Court agrees, the Double Jeopardy Clause cannot be ignored in this context, my view is that the subsequent prosecutions in both Dixon and Foster were impermissible as to all counts. I reach this conclusion because the offenses at issue in the contempt proceedings were either identical to, or lesser included offenses of, those charged in the subsequent prosecutions. Justice Scalia's contrary conclusion as to some of Foster's counts, which he reaches by exclusive focus on the formal elements of the relevant crimes, is divorced from the purposes of the constitutional provision he purports to apply. Moreover, the results to which this approach would lead are indefensible.
A
The contempt orders in Foster and Dixon referred in one case to the District's laws regarding assaults and threats, and, in the other, to the criminal code in its entirety. The prohibitions imposed by the court orders, in other words,
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