OCTOBER TERM, 1997
Syllabus
certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the tenth circuit
No. 96-976. Argued October 8, 1997—Decided December 10, 1997
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) imposed monetary penalties and occupational debarment on petitioners for violating 12 U. S. C. §§ 84(a)(1) and 375b by causing two banks in which they were officials to make certain loans in a manner that unlawfully allowed petitioner Hudson to receive the loans' benefit. When the Government later criminally indicted petitioners for essentially the same conduct, they moved to dismiss under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The District Court ultimately dismissed the indictments, but the Court of Appeals reversed, relying on United States v. Halper, 490 U. S. 435, 448-449.
Held: The Double Jeopardy Clause is not a bar to petitioners' later criminal prosecution because the OCC administrative proceedings were civil, not criminal. Pp. 98-105.
(a) The Clause protects only against the imposition of multiple criminal punishments for the same offense. See, e. g., Helvering v. Mitchell, 303 U. S. 391, 399. Halper deviated from this Court's longstanding double jeopardy doctrine in two key respects. First, it bypassed the traditional threshold question whether the legislature intended the particular successive punishment to be "civil" or "criminal" in nature, see, e. g., United States v. Ward, 448 U. S. 242, 248, focusing instead on whether the sanction was so grossly disproportionate to the harm caused as to constitute "punishment." The Court thereby elevated to dispositive status one of the factors listed in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U. S. 144, 168-169, for determining whether a statute intended to be civil was so punitive as to transform it into a criminal penalty, even though Kennedy itself emphasized that no one factor should be considered controlling, id., at 169. Second, Halper "assess[ed] the character of the actual sanctions imposed," 490 U. S., at 447, rather than, as Kennedy demanded, evaluating the "statute on its face" to determine whether it provided for what amounted to a criminal sanction, 372 U. S., at 169. Such deviations were ill considered. Halper's test has proved unworkable, creating confusion by attempting to distinguish between "punitive" and "nonpunitive" penalties. Moreover, some of the ills at which it was directed are addressed by other constitutional provisions.
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