Cite as: 524 U. S. 321 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
(Nov. 1994). Such penalties confirm a minimal level of culpability.14
The harm that respondent caused was also minimal. Failure to report his currency affected only one party, the Government, and in a relatively minor way. There was no fraud on the United States, and respondent caused no loss to the public fisc. Had his crime gone undetected, the Government would have been deprived only of the information that $357,144 had left the country. The Government and the dissent contend that there is a correlation between the amount forfeited and the harm that the Government would have suffered had the crime gone undetected. See Brief for United States 30 (forfeiture is "perfectly calibrated"); post, at 344 ("a fine calibrated with this accuracy"). We disagree. There is no inherent proportionality in such a forfeiture. It is impossible to conclude, for example, that the harm respondent caused is anywhere near 30 times greater than that caused by a hypothetical drug dealer who willfully fails to report taking $12,000 out of the country in order to purchase drugs.
Comparing the gravity of respondent's crime with the $357,144 forfeiture the Government seeks, we conclude that such a forfeiture would be grossly disproportional to the
14 In considering an offense's gravity, the other penalties that the Legislature has authorized are certainly relevant evidence. Here, as the Government and the dissent stress, Congress authorized a maximum fine of $250,000 plus five years' imprisonment for willfully violating the statutory reporting requirement, and this suggests that it did not view the reporting offense as a trivial one. That the maximum fine and Guideline sentence to which respondent was subject were but a fraction of the penalties authorized, however, undercuts any argument based solely on the statute, because they show that respondent's culpability relative to other potential violators of the reporting provision--tax evaders, drug kingpins, or money launderers, for example--is small indeed. This disproportion is telling notwithstanding the fact that a separate Guideline provision permits forfeiture if mandated by statute, see post, at 350-351. That Guideline, moreover, cannot override the constitutional requirement of proportionality review.
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