Cite as: 526 U. S. 813 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
crime the statute creates. Emphasizing the first two words in the passage does not eliminate the last.
Nor can the Government successfully appeal to a history or tradition of treating individual criminal "violations" as simply means toward the commission of a greater crime. The Government virtually concedes the absence of any such tradition when it says that the statute "departed significantly from common-law models and prior drug laws, creating a new crime keyed to the concept of a 'continuing criminal enterprise.' " Id., at 18. The closest analogies it cites consist of state statutes making criminal such crimes as sexual abuse of a minor. State courts interpreting such statutes have sometimes permitted jury disagreement about a "specific" underlying criminal "incident" insisting only upon proof of a "continuous course of conduct" in violation of the law. E. g., People v. Gear, 19 Cal. App. 4th 86, 89-94, 23 Cal. Rptr. 2d 261, 263-267 (1993) (continuous sexual abuse of a child); People v. Reynolds, 294 Ill. App. 3d 58, 69-71, 689 N. E. 2d 335, 343-344 (1997) (criminal sexual assault of a minor and aggravated sexual abuse of a minor); State v. Spigarolo, 210 Conn. 359, 391-392, 556 A. 2d 112, 129 (1989) (committing an act likely to impair the health or morals of a child); Soper v. State, 731 P. 2d 587, 591 (Alaska App. 1987) (sexual assault in the first degree). With one exception, see Cal. Penal Code Ann. § 288.5(a) (West Supp. 1998), the statutes do not define the statutory crime in terms that require the commission of other predicate crimes by the defendant. The state practice may well respond to special difficulties of proving individual underlying criminal acts, People v. Gear, supra, at 90-92, 23 Cal. Rptr. 2d, at 264-265, which difficulties are absent here. See infra, at 823-824. The cases are not federal but state, where this Court has not held that the Constitution imposes a jury-unanimity requirement. Johnson v. Louisiana, 406 U. S., at 366 (Powell, J., concurring). And their special subject matter indicates that they represent an exception; they do not represent a general
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