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Syllabus
States, 509 U. S. 602, 609-610. Forfeitures--payments in kind--are thus "fines" if they constitute punishment for an offense. Section 982(a)(1) currency forfeitures do so. The statute directs a court to order forfeiture as an additional sanction when "imposing sentence on a person convicted of" a willful violation of § 5316's reporting requirement. The forfeiture is thus imposed at the culmination of a criminal proceeding and requires conviction of an underlying felony, and it cannot be imposed upon an innocent owner of unreported currency. Cf. id., at 619. The Court rejects the Government's argument that such forfeitures serve important remedial purposes—by deterring illicit movements of cash and giving the Government valuable information to investigate and detect criminal activities associated with that cash—because the asserted loss of information here would not be remedied by confiscation of respondent's $357,144. The Government's argument that the § 982(a)(1) forfeiture is constitutional because it falls within a class of historic forfeitures of property tainted by crime is also rejected. In so arguing, the Government relies upon a series of cases involving traditional civil in rem forfeitures that are inapposite because such forfeitures were historically considered nonpunitive. See, e. g., The Palmyra, 12 Wheat. 1, 14-15. Section 982(a)(1) descends from a different historical tradition: that of in personam criminal forfeitures. Similarly, the Court declines to accept the Government's contention that the forfeiture here is constitutional because it involves an "instrumentality" of respondent's crime. Because instrumentalities historically have been treated as a form of "guilty property" forfeitable in civil in rem proceedings, it is irrelevant whether respondent's currency is an instrumentality; the forfeiture is punitive, and the test for its excessiveness involves solely a proportionality determination. Pp. 327-334.
(b) A punitive forfeiture violates the Excessive Fines Clause if it is grossly disproportional to the gravity of the offense that it is designed to punish. Although the proportionality principle has always been the touchstone of the inquiry, see, e. g., Austin, supra, at 622-623, the Clause's text and history provide little guidance as to how disproportional a forfeiture must be to be "excessive." Until today, the Court has not articulated a governing standard. In deriving the standard, the Court finds two considerations particularly relevant. The first, previously emphasized in cases interpreting the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, is that judgments about the appropriate punishment belong in the first instance to the legislature. See, e. g., Solem v. Helm, 463 U. S. 277, 290. The second is that any judicial determination regarding the gravity of a particular criminal offense will be inherently imprecise. Because both considerations counsel against requiring strict
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