Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 643

529US2

Unit: $U52

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568

CARMELL v. TEXAS

Ginsburg, J., dissenting

facto laws without mentioning Chase’s fourth category at all.
Id., at 169–170. And in Collins the Court cited with appar-
ent approval Beazell’s omission of the fourth category, 497
U. S., at 43, n. 3, declaring that “[t]he Beazell formulation is
faithful to our best knowledge of the original understanding
of the Ex Post Facto Clause: Legislatures may not retro-
actively alter the deﬁnition of crimes or increase the pun-
ishment for criminal acts.”
Id., at 43. Collins concluded
by reciting in the plainest terms the prohibitions laid
down by the Ex Post Facto Clause: A statute may not
“punish as a crime an act previously committed, which was
innocent when done; nor make more burdensome the pun-
ishment for a crime, after its commission; nor deprive one
charged with crime of any defense available according to
law at the time when the act was committed.”
Id., at 52.
This recitation conforms to Calder’s ﬁrst three categories,
but not the fourth; changes in evidentiary rules are no-
where mentioned.12

The majority asserts that the Court has repeatedly en-
dorsed Justice Chase’s formulation, “including, in particu-
lar, the fourth category,” and it offers an impressive-looking
string citation in support of the claim. Ante, at 525. Yet
all of those cases simply quoted or paraphrased Chase’s enu-
meration, a mechanical task that naturally entailed a recita-
tion of the fourth category. Not one of them depended on
that category for the judgment the Court reached.13 Nei-

12 In California Dept. of Corrections v. Morales, 514 U. S. 499, 504–505
(1995), the Court similarly enumerated the categories of ex post facto laws
without mentioning the fourth category.

13 The Court in Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277 (1867), invoked the
fourth category, see id., at 328, but that invocation was hardly necessary
to the Court’s holding.
In Cummings, as already noted, the Court invali-
dated on Bill of Attainder Clause and Ex Post Facto Clause grounds state
constitutional amendments that imposed punishment on persons unable to
swear an oath that they had not taken up arms against the Union in the
Civil War. The Court recognized that the challenged amendments,
though framed in terms of a method of proof, were “aimed at past acts,