Cite as: 538 U. S. 510 (2003)
Opinion of Souter, J.
ings, but that due process under the Fifth Amendment conditions a potentially lengthy detention on a hearing and an impartial decisionmaker's finding that detention is necessary to a governmental purpose. He thus invokes our repeated decisions that the claim of liberty protected by the Fifth Amendment is at its strongest when government seeks to detain an individual. The Chief Justice wrote in 1987 that "[i]n our society liberty is the norm, and detention prior to trial or without trial is the carefully limited exception." United States v. Salerno, 481 U. S. 739, 755. See also Reno v. Flores, 507 U. S. 292, 316 (1993) (O'Connor, J., concurring) ("The institutionalization of an adult by the government triggers heightened, substantive due process scrutiny"); Foucha v. Louisiana, 504 U. S. 71, 80 (1992) ("Freedom from bodily restraint has always been at the core of the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause from arbitrary governmental action"); id., at 90 (Kennedy, J., dissenting) ("As incarceration of persons is the most common and one of the most feared instruments of state oppression and state indifference, we ought to acknowledge at the outset that freedom from this restraint is essential to the basic definition of liberty in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution").
Accordingly, the Fifth Amendment permits detention only where "heightened, substantive due process scrutiny" finds a " 'sufficiently compelling' " governmental need. Flores, supra, at 316 (O'Connor, J., concurring) (quoting Salerno, 481 U. S., at 748). In deciding in Salerno that this principle did not categorically bar pretrial detention of criminal defendants without bail under the Bail Reform Act of 1984, it was crucial that the statute provided that, "[i]n a full-blown adversary hearing, the Government must convince a neutral decisionmaker by clear and convincing evidence that no conditions of release can reasonably assure the safety of the community or any person." Id., at 750 (citing 18 U. S. C.
say on the subject of the right of LPRs to protection of their liberty under the Due Process Clause. See supra, at 543-547.
549
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