308
Opinion of Stevens, J.
The Court expends a great deal of effort attempting to distinguish Austin away as purely an excessive fines case. The Court states, for example, that it is "difficult to see" how one would apply the "rule of Halper" to a civil forfeiture such as was present in Austin. Ante, at 283. But the Court conflates the two different rules that Halper announced. As discussed above, Austin expressly quoted Halper and followed its general rule that a sanction should be characterized as "punishment" if it serves any punitive end. See 509 U. S., at 610, 621. It relegated to a footnote Halper's narrower rule—the one for the "rare case," which requires an accounting of the Government's damages and costs—because it had already decided that the statute was of a punitive character. 509 U. S., at 622, n. 14. That approach was perfectly appropriate. There is no need to determine whether a statute that is punitive by design has a punitive effect when applied in the individual case. Halper is entirely consistent with Austin, because it determined first that the sanction there generally did not have a punitive character before it considered whether some applications might be punitive nonetheless.5
The majority implies that Austin's "categorical approach" is somehow suspect as an application of double jeopardy jurisprudence, ante, at 286-287, but Kurth Ranch definitively refutes that suggestion. The sanction there was a tax imposed on marijuana and applied to a taxpayer who had already been prosecuted for ownership of the drugs sought to be taxed. Again applying Halper's definition of punishment, see 511 U. S., at 779-780, we considered the nature of the tax, focusing on several unusual features that distinguished it from ordinary revenue-raising provisions, and con-5 Even if Austin had not followed Halper's rule for defining punishment, it would make little sense to say that forfeiture might be punishment "for the purposes of" the Excessive Fines Clause but not the Double Jeopardy Clause. It is difficult to imagine why the Framers of the two Amendments would have required a particular sanction not to be excessive, but would have allowed it to be imposed multiple times for the same offense.
Page: Index Previous 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007