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Opinion of the Court
tions for the same offense after acquittal or conviction and against multiple criminal punishments for the same offense. See North Carolina v. Pearce, 395 U. S. 711, 717 (1969). Historically, we have found double jeopardy protections inapplicable to sentencing proceedings, see Bullington, 451 U. S., at 438, because the determinations at issue do not place a defendant in jeopardy for an "offense," see, e. g., Nichols v. United States, 511 U. S. 738, 747 (1994) (noting that repeat-offender laws " 'penaliz[e] only the last offense committed by the defendant' "). Nor have sentence enhancements been construed as additional punishment for the previous offense; rather, they act to increase a sentence "because of the manner in which [the defendant] committed the crime of conviction." United States v. Watts, 519 U. S. 148, 154 (1997) (per curiam); see also Witte v. United States, 515 U. S. 389, 398- 399 (1995). An enhanced sentence imposed on a persistent offender thus "is not to be viewed as either a new jeopardy or additional penalty for the earlier crimes" but as "a stiffened penalty for the latest crime, which is considered to be an aggravated offense because a repetitive one." Gryger v. Burke, 334 U. S. 728, 732 (1948); cf. Moore v. Missouri, 159 U. S. 673, 678 (1895) ("[T]he State may undoubtedly provide that persons who have been before convicted of crime may suffer severer punishment for subsequent of-fences than for a first offence").
Justice Scalia insists that the recidivism enhancement the Court confronts here in fact constitutes an element of petitioner's offense. His dissent addresses an issue that was neither considered by the state courts nor discussed in petitioner's brief before this Court. In any event, Justice Scalia acknowledges, post, at 741, that his argument is squarely foreclosed by our decision in Almendarez-Torres v. United States, 523 U. S. 224 (1998). One could imagine circumstances in which fundamental fairness would require that a particular fact be treated as an element of the offense, see post, at 738 (Scalia, J., dissenting), but there are also
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