Cite as: 509 U. S. 688 (1993)
Opinion of Souter, J.
tively to unmistakable threats to their own authority and to those who have sought the court's protection.
This fact is poignantly stressed by the amici:
"[C]ontempt litigators and criminal prosecutors seek to further different interests. A battered woman seeks to enforce her private order to end the violence against her. In contrast, the criminal prosecutor is vindicating society's interest in enforcing its criminal law. The two interests are not the same, and to consider the contempt litigator and the criminal prosecutor as one and the same would be to adopt an absurd fiction." Brief for Ayuda et al. as Amici Curiae 20 (emphasis in original).
Finally, I cannot so easily distinguish between "summary" and "nonsummary" contempt proceedings, ante, at 696-697, for the interests served in both are fundamentally similar. It is as much a "disruption of judicial process," ante, at 695, to disobey a judge's conditional release order as it is to disturb a judge's courtroom. And the interests served in vindicating the authority of the court are fundamentally different from those served by the prosecution of violations of the substantive criminal law. Because I believe that neither Dixon nor Foster would be "subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb," U. S. Const., Amdt. 5, I would reverse the judgment of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
Justice Souter, with whom Justice Stevens joins, concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part.
While I agree with the Court as far as it goes in holding that a citation for criminal contempt and an indictment for violating a substantive criminal statute may amount to charges of the "same offence" for purposes of the Double Jeopardy Clause, U. S. Const., Amdt. 5, I cannot join the Court in restricting the Clause's reach and dismembering the protection against successive prosecution that the Constitu-
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