Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 367.0

524US2

Unit: $U89

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322

UNITED STATES v. BAJAKAJIAN

Syllabus

States, 509 U. S. 602, 609–610. Forfeitures––payments in kind––are
thus “ﬁnes” if they constitute punishment for an offense. Section
982(a)(1) currency forfeitures do so. The statute directs a court to
order forfeiture as an additional sanction when “imposing sentence on a
person convicted of ” a willful violation of § 5316’s reporting require-
ment. The forfeiture is thus imposed at the culmination of a criminal
proceeding and requires conviction of an underlying felony, and it cannot
be imposed upon an innocent owner of unreported currency. Cf. id., at
619. The Court rejects the Government’s argument that such forfeit-
ures serve important remedial purposes—by deterring illicit move-
ments of cash and giving the Government valuable information to inves-
tigate and detect criminal activities associated with that cash—because
the asserted loss of information here would not be remedied by conﬁs-
cation of respondent’s $357,144. The Government’s argument that the
§ 982(a)(1) forfeiture is constitutional because it falls within a class of
In so
historic forfeitures of property tainted by crime is also rejected.
arguing, the Government relies upon a series of cases involving tradi-
tional civil in rem forfeitures that are inapposite because such forfeit-
ures were historically considered nonpunitive. See, e. g., The Palmyra,
12 Wheat. 1, 14–15. Section 982(a)(1) descends from a different histori-
cal tradition: that of in personam criminal forfeitures. Similarly, the
Court declines to accept the Government’s contention that the forfeit-
ure here is constitutional because it involves an “instrumentality” of
respondent’s crime. Because instrumentalities historically have been
treated as a form of “guilty property” forfeitable in civil in rem proceed-
ings, it is irrelevant whether respondent’s currency is an instrumental-
ity; the forfeiture is punitive, and the test for its excessiveness involves
solely a proportionality determination. Pp. 327–334.

(b) A punitive forfeiture violates the Excessive Fines Clause if it is
grossly disproportional to the gravity of the offense that it is designed
to punish. Although the proportionality principle has always been the
touchstone of the inquiry, see, e. g., Austin, supra, at 622–623, the
Clause’s text and history provide little guidance as to how dispropor-
tional a forfeiture must be to be “excessive.” Until today, the Court
has not articulated a governing standard.
In deriving the standard,
the Court ﬁnds two considerations particularly relevant. The ﬁrst, pre-
viously emphasized in cases interpreting the Cruel and Unusual Punish-
ments Clause, is that judgments about the appropriate punishment be-
long in the ﬁrst instance to the legislature. See, e. g., Solem v. Helm,
463 U. S. 277, 290. The second is that any judicial determination re-
garding the gravity of a particular criminal offense will be inherently
imprecise. Because both considerations counsel against requiring strict