828
Kennedy, J., dissenting
By holding that the Government must in addition allege three or more discrete violations, thus pinning a case involving thousands of transactions on just three of them, the Court misunderstands the whole design and purpose of the statute.
We begin on common ground, for, as the Court acknowledges, it is settled that jurors need not agree on all of the means the accused used to commit an offense. Schad v. Arizona, 501 U. S. 624 (1991), confirmed this principle. In my view, Congress intended the "continuing series of violations" to be one of the defining characteristics of a continuing criminal enterprise, and therefore to be a single element of the offense, subject to fulfillment in various ways. The important point is not just that the violations occurred but that they relate to the enterprise and demonstrate its ongoing nature, hence the requirement of a "continuing" series. Evidence that the accused supervised a ring that engaged in thousands of illegal transactions is more probative of the continuing nature of the enterprise than evidence tending to show three particular violations.
Nowhere in the text of the statute or its legislative history does Congress show an interest in the particular predicate violations constituting the continuing series. Rather, the CCE offense is aimed at what Congress perceived to be a peculiar evil: the drug kingpin. The Court's observation that there is a tradition requiring juror unanimity where the issue is whether a defendant has engaged in conduct that violates the law, ante, at 818, simply restates the question presented. The Court has made clear in an earlier case that Congress did not "inten[d] to substitute the CCE offense for the underlying predicate offenses in the case of a big-time drug dealer," but rather intended "to permit prosecution for CCE in addition to prosecution for the predicate offenses." Garrett v. United States, 471 U. S. 773, 785, 786 (1985). The CCE statute provides a specific remedy to combat criminal organizations, in large part because of the perceived inade-
Page: Index Previous 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007