Monge v. California, 524 U.S. 721, 10 (1998)

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730

MONGE v. CALIFORNIA

Opinion of the Court

The Double Jeopardy Clause "does not provide the defendant with the right to know at any specific moment in time what the exact limit of his punishment will turn out to be." DiFrancesco, 449 U. S., at 137. Consequently, it is a "well-established part of our constitutional jurisprudence" that the guarantee against double jeopardy neither prevents the prosecution from seeking review of a sentence nor restricts the length of a sentence imposed upon retrial after a defend-ant's successful appeal. See id., at 135; Pearce, supra, at 720; see also Stroud v. United States, 251 U. S. 15, 18 (1919) (despite a harsher sentence on retrial, the defendant was not "placed in second jeopardy within the meaning of the Constitution").

Our opinion in Bullington established a "narrow exception" to the general rule that double jeopardy principles have no application in the sentencing context. See Schiro v. Farley, 510 U. S. 222, 231 (1994). In Bullington, a capital defendant had received a sentence of life imprisonment from the original sentencing jury. The defendant subsequently obtained a new trial on the ground that the court had permitted prospective women jurors to claim automatic exemption from jury service in violation of the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. 451 U. S., at 436. When the State announced its intention to seek the death penalty again, the defendant alleged a double jeopardy violation. We determined that the first jury's deliberations bore the "hallmarks of the trial on guilt or innocence," id., at 439, because the jury was presented with a choice between two alternatives together with standards to guide their decision, the prosecution undertook the burden of establishing facts beyond a reasonable doubt, and the evidence was introduced in a separate proceeding that formally resembled a trial, id., at 438. In light of the jury's binary determination and the heightened procedural protections, we found the proceeding distinct from traditional sentencing, in which "it is impossible to conclude that a sentence less than the statutory maximum 'con-

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