432
Opinion of the Court
II
Although compensatory damages and punitive damages are typically awarded at the same time by the same decision-maker, they serve distinct purposes. The former are intended to redress the concrete loss that the plaintiff has suffered by reason of the defendant's wrongful conduct. See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 903, pp. 453-454 (1979); Pacific Mut. Life Ins. Co. v. Haslip, 499 U. S. 1, 54 (1991) (O'Connor, J., dissenting). The latter, which have been described as "quasi-criminal," id., at 19, operate as "private fines" intended to punish the defendant and to deter future wrongdoing. A jury's assessment of the extent of a plaintiff's injury is essentially a factual determination, whereas its imposition of punitive damages is an expression of its moral condemnation. See Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323, 350 (1974) ("[Punitive damages] are not compensation for injury. Instead, they are private fines levied by civil juries to punish reprehensible conduct and to deter its future occurrence"); Haslip, 499 U. S., at 54 (O'Connor, J., dissenting) ("[P]unitive damages are specifically designed to exact punishment in excess of actual harm to make clear that the defendant's misconduct was especially reprehensible").5
Legislatures have extremely broad discretion in defining criminal offenses, Schall v. Martin, 467 U. S. 253, 268-269, n. 18 (1984), and in setting the range of permissible punishments for each offense, ibid.; Solem v. Helm, 463 U. S. 277, 290 (1983). Judicial decisions that operate within these legislatively enacted guidelines are typically reviewed for abuse of discretion. See, e. g., Koon v. United States, 518 U. S. 81, 96, 99-100 (1996); cf. Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U. S. 466, 481 (2000) (it is permissible "for judges to exercise dis-5 See also Sunstein, Kahneman, & Schkade, Assessing Punitive Damages (With Notes on Cognition and Valuation in Law), 107 Yale L. J. 2071, 2074 (1998) ("[P]unitive damages may have a retributive or expressive function, designed to embody social outrage at the action of serious wrongdoers").
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