264
Kennedy, J., dissenting
rious bodily injury" should be classed as an element or a sentencing factor. Neither possibility sustains the Court's interpretation of § 2119.
II
Although the Court, in my view, errs in its reading of § 2119 as a simple matter of statutory construction, of far greater concern is its constitutional discussion. In order to inject the rule of constitutional doubt into the case, the Court treats the relevant line of authorities from Winship to Almendarez-Torres as if it had been the Court's purpose to write them at odds with each other, not to produce a coherent body of case law interpreting the relevant constitutional provisions. This attempt to create instability is neither a proper use of the rule of constitutional doubt nor a persuasive reading of our precedents. We have settled more than the Court's opinion says.
In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358 (1970), made clear what has long been accepted in our criminal justice system. It is the principle that in a criminal case the government must establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. To implement this constitutional protection, it follows, there must be an understanding of the essential elements of the crime; and cases like this one will arise, requiring statutory analysis.
Nonetheless, the holding of the first case decided in the wake of Winship, Mullaney v. Wilbur, 421 U. S. 684 (1975), now seems straightforward. In homicide cases, Maine sought to presume malice from the fact of an intentional killing alone, subject to the defendant's right to prove he had acted in the heat of passion. This was so even though "the fact at issue . . .—the presence or absence of the heat of passion on sudden provocation—has been, almost from the inception of the common law of homicide, the single most important factor in determining the degree of culpability attaching to an unlawful homicide." Id., at 696. As we later explained, Mullaney "held that a State must prove every ingredient of an offense beyond a reasonable doubt, and that
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