Opinion ID: 714794
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Trilogy.

Text: 17 The seminal case is Halper. There the government successfully prosecuted criminal charges against a physician who, it asserted, had defrauded the federal Medicare program on sixty-five separate occasions. The judge imposed a prison sentence and a fine. See Halper, 490 U.S. at 437, 109 S.Ct. at 1895-96. Thereafter, the government brought a civil suit against Dr. Halper under the False Claims Act, 31 U.S.C. §§ 3729-3730, seeking to recover damages plus a penalty equal to $2,000 per violation. The district judge, after contrasting the extent of the government's claim for these items ($131,170) with the provable amount of the loss occasioned by Dr. Halper's defalcations ($585), awarded the government $16,000. The judge reasoned that a more munificent award would be so disproportionate as to constitute punishment and would therefore raise double jeopardy questions. See Halper, 490 U.S. at 438-39, 109 S.Ct. at 1896-97. The Supreme Court ultimately accepted this reasoning, 4 finding double jeopardy to be a matter of concern where a fixed-penalty provision subjects a[n] ... offender to a sanction overwhelmingly disproportionate to the damages he has caused. Id. at 449, 109 S.Ct. at 1902. 18 The Halper Court offered some insights into when particular civil penalties might be regarded as punishments in the relevant sense. Making such a determination requires a particularized assessment of the penalty imposed and the purposes the penalty may fairly be said to serve. Simply put, a civil as well as a criminal sanction constitutes punishment when the sanction as applied in the individual case serves the goals of punishment. Id. at 448, 109 S.Ct. at 1901-02. Withal, Halper did not brand every monetary penalty exceeding actual financial loss as punitive per se. To the contrary, the Court stated that the Government is entitled to rough remedial justice, that is, it may demand compensation according to somewhat imprecise formulas, such as reasonable liquidated damages or a fixed sum plus double damages, without being deemed to have imposed a second punishment for the purpose of double jeopardy analysis. Id. at 446, 109 S.Ct. at 1900. It is only when the recovery is not rationally related to the goal of making the Government whole that the prospect of multiple punishment looms. Id. at 451, 109 S.Ct. at 1903. It is in this context that the Halper dichotomy surfaced: Justice Blackmun wrote that a civil sanction that cannot fairly be said solely to serve a remedial purpose, but rather can only be explained as also serving either retributive or deterrent purposes, is punishment, as we have come to understand the term. Id. at 448, 109 S.Ct. at 1902. 19 In Austin v. United States, 509 U.S. 602, 113 S.Ct. 2801, 125 L.Ed.2d 488 (1993), the Court mulled a constitutional challenge to the civil forfeiture of property (Austin's home and business) used to facilitate narcotics transactions. After deciding that the Excessive Fines Clause, U.S. Const.amend. VIII, reached punitive sanctions levied in nominally civil proceedings, see id. at ----, 113 S.Ct. at 2805-06, Justice Blackmun invoked his own invention--the Halper dichotomy--as an aid in determining how a particular sanction might be characterized. Responding to concerns articulated by Justices Scalia and Kennedy (each of whom concurred in the judgment but wrote separately), Justice Blackmun suggested that under Halper the question is whether forfeiture serves in part to punish, and one need not exclude the possibility that forfeiture serves other purposes to reach that conclusion. Id. at ---- n. 12, 113 S.Ct. at 2810 n. 12 (emphasis in original). While Justice Blackmun acknowledged that the forfeiture of contraband itself may be characterized as remedial because it removes dangerous or illegal items from society, he declined to extend that reasoning to the sovereign's confiscation of a defendant's home and business (even though drug trafficking may have occurred there). Id. at ----, 113 S.Ct. at 2811. Moreover, the dramatic variations in the value of ... property forfeitable under the applicable civil forfeiture statutes undermined any serious claim that such forfeitures merely provided appropriate compensation for the government's losses. Id. at ----, 113 S.Ct. at 2812. In other words, forfeitures of random magnitude were punitive in nature mainly because of sheer vagariousness. 5 20 The capstone of the trilogy is Department of Revenue v. Kurth Ranch, --- U.S. ----, 114 S.Ct. 1937, 128 L.Ed.2d 767 (1994). There the Supreme Court revisited its double jeopardy jurisprudence and found that a Montana tax on the possession of illegal drugs constituted a punishment. See id. at ----, 114 S.Ct. at 1948. Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, abjured the Halper dichotomy. He explained this shift of focus on the basis that Halper 's method of determining whether the exaction was remedial or punitive simply does not work in the case of a tax statute. Id. (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 6 21 In lieu of the inelastic Halper dichotomy the Kurth Ranch Court advocated a more flexible approach and undertook to evaluate the defendant's double jeopardy claim through an examination of the aggregate circumstances surrounding the imposition of the tax. See id. at ----, 114 S.Ct. at 1946-48. Marshaling the pertinent facts, the Court remarked the tax's high rate, obvious deterrent purpose, and linkage with the taxpayer's commission of a drug-related crime, see id. at ----, 114 S.Ct. at 1946-47, and took particular note of the fact that the property to be taxed was no longer in the taxpayer's possession, see id. at ----, 114 S.Ct. at 1948. Accordingly, the Court judged the tax to be punitive and held that its assessment after the taxpayer had been convicted and sentenced for the underlying narcotics offense would constitute double jeopardy. See id. 22