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MONGE v. CALIFORNIA

Opinion of the Court

tions for the same offense after acquittal or conviction and
against multiple criminal punishments for the same offense.
See North Carolina v. Pearce, 395 U. S. 711, 717 (1969).
Historically, we have found double jeopardy protections in-
applicable to sentencing proceedings, see Bullington, 451
U. S., at 438, because the determinations at issue do not place
a defendant in jeopardy for an “offense,” see, e. g., Nichols v.
United States, 511 U. S. 738, 747 (1994) (noting that repeat-
offender laws “ ‘penaliz[e] only the last offense committed by
the defendant’ ”). Nor have sentence enhancements been
construed as additional punishment for the previous offense;
rather, they act to increase a sentence “because of the man-
ner in which [the defendant] committed the crime of con-
viction.” United States v. Watts, 519 U. S. 148, 154 (1997)
(per curiam); see also Witte v. United States, 515 U. S. 389,
398– 399 (1995). An enhanced sentence imposed on a
persistent offender thus “is not to be viewed as either a new
jeopardy or additional penalty for the earlier crimes” but as
“a stiffened penalty for the latest crime, which is considered
to be an aggravated offense because a repetitive one.”
Gryger v. Burke, 334 U. S. 728, 732 (1948); cf. Moore v. Mis-
souri, 159 U. S. 673, 678 (1895) (“[T]he State may undoubt-
edly provide that persons who have been before convicted of
crime may suffer severer punishment for subsequent of-
fences than for a ﬁrst offence”).

Justice Scalia insists that the recidivism enhancement
the Court confronts here in fact constitutes an element of
petitioner’s offense. His dissent addresses an issue that was
neither considered by the state courts nor discussed in peti-
In any event, Justice
tioner’s brief before this Court.
Scalia acknowledges, post, at 741, that his argument is
squarely foreclosed by our decision in Almendarez-Torres v.
United States, 523 U. S. 224 (1998). One could imagine cir-
cumstances in which fundamental fairness would require
that a particular fact be treated as an element of the offense,
see post, at 738 (Scalia, J., dissenting), but there are also