Cite as: 518 U. S. 267 (1996)
Kennedy, J., concurring
cence, whether or not he committed any criminal acts, it is not a punishment for a person's criminal wrongdoing.
Forfeiture, then, punishes an owner by taking property involved in a crime, and it may happen that the owner is also the wrongdoer charged with a criminal offense. But the forfeiture is not a second in personam punishment for the offense, which is all the Double Jeopardy Clause prohibits. See ante, at 276 ("The forfeitures were not criminal punishments because they did not impose a second in personam penalty for the criminal defendant's wrongdoing"); One Lot Emerald Cut Stones v. United States, 409 U. S. 232, 235 (1972) (per curiam) ("[T]he forfeiture is not barred by the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment because it involves neither two criminal trials nor two criminal punishments").
Civil in rem forfeiture has long been understood as independent of criminal punishments. In The Palmyra, 12 Wheat. 1 (1827), we rejected a claim that a libel in rem required a conviction for the criminal offense charged in the libel. Distinguishing forfeitures of a felon's goods and chattels, which required proof of a conviction, we noted that the statutory in rem "offence is attached primarily to the thing," and that often in rem forfeiture was imposed in the absence of any in personam penalty. Id., at 14. Examining American and English statutes, we concluded: "[T]he practice has been, and so this Court understand[s] the law to be, that the proceeding in rem stands independent of, and wholly unaffected by any criminal proceeding in personam." Id., at 15.
Distinguishing between in rem and in personam punishments does not depend upon, or revive, the fiction alive in Various Items, supra, at 581, but condemned in Austin, supra, at 615, n. 9, that the property is punished as if it were a sentient being capable of moral choice. It is the owner who feels the pain and receives the stigma of the forfeiture, not the property. See United States v. United States Coin & Currency, 401 U. S. 715, 718 (1971). The distinction
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