Cite as: 509 U. S. 688 (1993)
Opinion of White, J.
n. 17, Justice Scalia finds that the Constitution does not prohibit retrial.
The distinction drawn by Justice Scalia is predicated on a reading of the Double Jeopardy Clause that is abstracted from the purposes the constitutional provision is designed to promote. To focus on the statutory elements of a crime makes sense where cumulative punishment is at stake, for there the aim simply is to uncover legislative intent. The Blockburger inquiry, accordingly, serves as a means to determine this intent, as our cases have recognized. See Missouri v. Hunter, 459 U. S., at 368. But, as Justice Souter shows, adherence to legislative will has very little to do with the important interests advanced by double jeopardy safeguards against successive prosecutions. Post, at 744. The central purpose of the Double Jeopardy Clause being to protect against vexatious multiple prosecutions, see Hunter, supra, at 365; United States v. Wilson, 420 U. S., at 343, these interests go well beyond the prevention of unauthorized punishment. The same-elements test is an inadequate safeguard, for it leaves the constitutional guarantee at the mercy of a legislature's decision to modify statutory definitions. Significantly, therefore, this Court has applied an inflexible version of the same-elements test only once, in 1911, in a successive prosecution case, see Gavieres v. United States, 220 U. S. 338 (1911), and has since noted that "[t]he Blockburger test is not the only standard for determining whether successive prosecutions impermissibly involve the same offense." Brown, 432 U. S., at 166-167, n. 6. Rather, "[e]ven if two offenses are sufficiently different to permit the imposition of consecutive sentences, successive prosecutions will be barred in some circumstances where the second prosecution requires the relitigation of factual issues already resolved by the first." Ibid.
Take the example of Count V in Foster: For all intents and purposes, the offense for which he was convicted in the contempt proceeding was his assault against his wife. The
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