Cite as: 526 U. S. 227 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
We engaged in just such an enquiry this past Term in Almendarez-Torres, where we stressed the history of treating recidivism as a sentencing factor, and noted that, with perhaps one exception, Congress had never clearly made prior conviction an offense element where the offense conduct, in the absence of recidivism, was independently unlawful. 523 U. S., at 230. Here, on the contrary, the search for comparable examples more readily suggests that Congress had separate and aggravated offenses in mind when it employed the scheme of numbered subsections in § 2119. Although Congress has explicitly treated serious bodily injury as a sentencing factor, see, e. g., 18 U. S. C. § 2262(b)(2) (inter-state violation of a protection order); § 248(b)(2) (free access to clinic entrances; bodily injury), it has unmistakably identified serious bodily injury as an offense element in any number of statutes, see, e. g., 10 U. S. C. § 928(b)(2) (assault by a member of the armed forces); 18 U. S. C. § 37(a)(1) (violence at international airports); § 1091(a)(2) (genocide). The likelihood that Congress understood injury to be an offense element here follows all the more from the fact that carjacking is a type of robbery, and serious bodily injury has traditionally been treated, both by Congress and by the state legislatures, as defining an element of the offense of aggravated robbery. As the Government acknowledges, Brief for United States 20-21, and n. 8, Congress modeled the federal carjacking statute on several other federal robbery statutes.4 One of them, 18 U. S. C. § 2118 (robbery involving controlled substances), clearly makes causing serious bodily injury an element of the offense. It provides that "[w]hoever takes or attempts to take from the person or presence of another by force or violence or by intimidation any [of certain controlled
4 Legislative history identifies three such models. See H. R. Rep. No. 102-851, pt. 1, p. 17 (1992) ("The definition of the offense tracks the language used in other federal robbery statutes (18 U. S. C. §§ 2111, 2113, 2118)"). One of them, 18 U. S. C. § 2111 (robbery in areas of federal maritime or territorial jurisdiction), lacks aggravated forms of the offense altogether, and thus is not on point here.
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