760
Opinion of Souter, J.
broken the single sentence of Grady's holding into its four constituent clauses before applying it, see Ladner, supra, reveal a type of " 'confusion,' " ante, at 711 (citation omitted), that can somehow obviate our obligation to adhere to precedent. Cf. Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U. S. 164, 173-174 (1989).
Nor do Burton and Gavieres have the strength to justify the Court's reading of Harris solely for the narrow proposition that, in a case where a statute refers to other offenses, the elements of those offenses are incorporated by reference in the statute.9 While reading the case this way might suffice for purposes of avoiding multiple punishment, this reading would work an unprecedented truncation of the protection afforded by the Double Jeopardy Clause against successive prosecutions, by transferring the government's leeway in determining how many offenses to create to the assessment of how many times a person may be prosecuted for the same conduct. The Double Jeopardy Clause then would provide no more protection against successive prosecutions than it provides against multiple punishments, and instead of expressing some principle underlying the protection against double jeopardy, Harris would be an anomaly, an "exceptio[n]" to Blockburger without principled justification. Grady, 495 U. S., at 528 (Scalia, J., dissenting). By relying on that anomaly and by defining its offenses with care, the government could not merely add punishment to
9 Indeed, at least where the common elements of the offenses themselves describe a separate criminal offense, the Court's reading of Harris v. Oklahoma, 433 U. S. 682 (1977), is apparently inconsistent even with the historical understanding of the Clause put forward by three of the dissenters in Grady. See Grady v. Corbin, 495 U. S. 508, 531 (1990) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (quoting 1 T. Starkie, Criminal Pleading, ch. xix, pp. 322-323 (2d ed. 1822)) (" '[I]f one charge consist of the circumstances A. B. C. and another of the circumstances A. D. E. then, if the circumstance which belongs to them in common does not of itself constitute a distinct substantive of-fence, an acquittal from the one charge cannot include an acquittal of the other' ") (emphasis supplied).
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