Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 381.0

524US2

Unit: $U89

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UNITED STATES v. BAJAKAJIAN

Opinion of the Court

merchandise; (3) and any other’s villain than ours shall
be likewise amerced, saving his wainage.” Magna
Charta, 9 Hen. III, ch. 14 (1225), 1 Stat. at Large 6–7
(1762 ed.).

None of these sources suggests how disproportional to the
gravity of an offense a ﬁne must be in order to be deemed
constitutionally excessive.

We must therefore rely on other considerations in deriving
a constitutional excessiveness standard, and there are two
that we ﬁnd particularly relevant. The ﬁrst, which we have
emphasized in our cases interpreting the Cruel and Unusual
Punishments Clause,
is that judgments about the appro-
priate punishment for an offense belong in the ﬁrst instance
to the legislature. See, e. g., Solem v. Helm, 463 U. S. 277,
290 (1983) (“Reviewing courts . . . should grant substantial
deference to the broad authority that legislatures necessarily
possess in determining the types and limits of punishments
for crimes”); see also Gore v. United States, 357 U. S. 386,
393 (1958) (“Whatever views may be entertained regarding
severity of punishment, . . . these are peculiarly questions of
legislative policy”). The second is that any judicial determi-
nation regarding the gravity of a particular criminal offense
will be inherently imprecise. Both of these principles coun-
sel against requiring strict proportionality between the
amount of a punitive forfeiture and the gravity of a criminal
offense, and we therefore adopt the standard of gross dispro-
portionality articulated in our Cruel and Unusual Punish-
ments Clause precedents. See, e. g., Solem v. Helm, supra,
at 288; Rummel v. Estelle, 445 U. S. 263, 271 (1980).

In applying this standard, the district courts in the ﬁrst
instance, and the courts of appeals, reviewing the propor-
tionality determination de novo,10 must compare the amount

10 At oral argument, respondent urged that a district court’s determina-
tion of excessiveness should be reviewed by an appellate court for abuse
of discretion. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 32. We cannot accept this submission.
The factual ﬁndings made by the district courts in conducting the exces-