Cite as: 529 U. S. 513 (2000)
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
not attach criminality to any act previously done, and which was innocent when done; nor aggravate any crime theretofore committed; nor provide a greater punishment therefor than was prescribed at the time of its commission; nor do they alter the degree, or lessen the amount or measure, of the proof which was made necessary to conviction when the crime was committed." Id., at 589.
As the quoted passage shows, the Court in Hopt rejected the defendant's Ex Post Facto Clause claim while retaining Calder's fourth category. The same outcome should obtain today, for Hopt cannot meaningfully be distinguished from the instant case.
The Court asserts that "Article 38.07 plainly fits" the fourth Calder category, because "[r]equiring only the victim's testimony to convict, rather than the victim's testimony plus other corroborating evidence is surely 'less testimony required to convict' in any straightforward sense of those words." Ante, at 530. Yet to declare Article 38.07 ex post facto on that basis is to overrule Hopt without saying so. For if the amended version of Article 38.07 requires "less testimony . . . to convict," then so do countless evidentiary rules, including the felon competency rule whose retroactive application we upheld in Hopt. In both this case and Hopt, a conviction based on evidence previously deemed inadmissible was sustained pursuant to a broadened rule regarding the competency of testimonial evidence. The mere fact that the new version of Article 38.07 makes some convictions easier to obtain cannot be enough to preclude its retroactive application. "Even though it may work to the disadvantage of a defendant, a procedural change is not ex post facto." Dobbert v. Florida, 432 U. S. 282, 293 (1977).
In short, the Court's expansive new reading of the Ex Post Facto Clause cannot be squared with this Court's prior decisions. Rather than embrace such an unprecedented approach, I would advance a "commonsense understanding of
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