Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 612.0

529US2

Unit: $U52

[09-26-01 10:36:40] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 529 U. S. 513 (2000)

537

Opinion of the Court

after Chafee), which may explain why the Framers twice
placed their respective prohibitions adjacent to one another.
And if the United States means to argue that category four
should be abandoned because its illustrative example was a
bill of attainder, this would prove entirely too much, because
all of the speciﬁc examples listed by Justice Chase were
passed as bills of attainder.27

Finally, both Texas and the United States argue that we
have already effectively cast out the fourth category in Col-
lins v. Youngblood, 497 U. S. 37 (1990). Collins held no such
thing. That case began its discussion of the Ex Post Facto
Clause by quoting verbatim Justice Chase’s “now familiar
Id., at
opinion in Calder” and his four-category deﬁnition.
41–42. After noting that “[e]arly opinions of the Court por-
trayed this as an exclusive deﬁnition of ex post facto laws,”
id., at 42, the Court then quoted from our opinion in Beazell
v. Ohio, 269 U. S. 167 (1925):

“ ‘It is settled, by decisions of this Court so well known
that their citation may be dispensed with, that any stat-
ute which punishes as a crime an act previously com-
mitted, which was innocent when done; which makes
more burdensome the punishment for a crime, after its
commission, or which deprives one charged with crime
of any defense available according to law at the time
when the act was committed, is prohibited as ex post

27 See An Act for the Attainder of Thomas Earle of Strafford of High
Treason, 16 Car. I, ch. 38 (1640), in 5 Statutes of the Realm 177 (reprint
1963); An Act for Banishing and Disenabling the Earl of Clarendon, 19 &
20 Car. II, ch. 2 (1667–1668), in 5 Statutes of the Realm, at 628; An Act
to Inﬂict Pains and Penalties on Francis (Atterbury) Lord Bishop of
Rochester, 9 Geo. I, ch. 17 (1722); An Act to Prevent Malicious Maiming
and Wounding (Coventry Act), 22 & 23 Car. II, ch. 1 (1670). While the
bills against the Earl of Clarendon and Bishop Atterbury appear to be
bills of pains and penalties, see Chafee 117, 136, as does the Coventry Act,
see 2 Wooddeson 638–639, those are simply a subspecies of bills of at-
tainder, the only difference being that the punishment was something less
than death. See Drehman v. Stiﬂe, 8 Wall. 595, 601 (1870).