Cite as: 515 U. S. 389 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
Petitioner nevertheless argues that, because the conduct giving rise to the cocaine charges was taken into account during sentencing for the marijuana conviction, he effectively was "punished" for that conduct during the first proceeding. As a result, he contends, the Double Jeopardy Clause bars the instant prosecution. This claim is ripe at this stage of the prosecution—although petitioner has not yet been convicted of the cocaine offenses—because, as we have said, "courts may not impose more than one punishment for the same offense and prosecutors ordinarily may not attempt to secure that punishment in more than one trial." Brown v. Ohio, 432 U. S. 161, 165 (1977). See also Ball v. United States, 470 U. S. 856, 861, 864-865 (1985) (explaining that, for purposes of the double jeopardy inquiry, punishment "must be the equivalent of a criminal conviction and not simply the imposition of sentence"); Ex parte Lange, supra, at 173. Thus, if petitioner is correct that the present case constitutes a second attempt to punish him criminally for the same cocaine offenses, see Helvering, supra, at 399, then the prosecution may not proceed. We agree with the Court of Appeals, however, that petitioner's double jeopardy theory— that consideration of uncharged conduct in arriving at a sentence within the statutorily authorized punishment range constitutes "punishment" for that conduct—is not supported by our precedents, which make clear that a defendant in that situation is punished, for double jeopardy purposes, only for the offense of which the defendant is convicted.
Traditionally, "[s]entencing courts have not only taken into consideration a defendant's prior convictions, but have also considered a defendant's past criminal behavior, even if no conviction resulted from that behavior." Nichols v. United States, 511 U. S. 738, 747 (1994). We explained in Williams v. New York, 337 U. S. 241, 246 (1949), that "both before and since the American colonies became a nation, courts in this country and in England practiced a policy under which a sentencing judge could exercise a wide discretion in the sources
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