Court Opinion

ID: 9429209
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:25:59.884857+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:17.837049
License: Public Domain

*675Justice White,
with whom The Chief Justice, Justice Powell, and Justice Rehnquist join, concurring in the judgment.
We deal here with the recurring situation where a person is convicted under a statute that authorizés fines or imprisonment or both, as well as probation. The defendant is then fined and placed on probation, one of the conditions of which is that he pay the fine and make restitution. In such a situation, the Court takes as a given that the State has decided that imprisonment is inappropriate because it is unnecessary to achieve its penal objectives. But that is true only if the defendant pays the fine and makes restitution and thereby suffers the financial penalty that such payment entails. Had the sentencing judge been quite sure that the defendant could not pay the fine, I cannot believe that the court would not have imposed some jail time or that either the Due Process or Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution would prevent such imposition.
Poverty does not insulate those who break the law from punishment. When probation is revoked for failure to pay a fine, I find nothing in the Constitution to prevent the trial court from revoking probation and imposing a term of imprisonment if revocation does not automatically result in the imposition of a long jail term and if the sentencing court makes a good-faith effort to impose a jail sentence that in terms of the State’s sentencing objectives will be roughly equivalent to the fine and restitution that the defendant failed to pay. See Wood v. Georgia, 450 U. S. 261, 284-287 (1981) (White, J., dissenting).
The Court holds, however, that if a probationer cannot pay the fine for reasons not of his own fault, the sentencing court must at least consider alternative measures of punishment other than imprisonment, and may imprison the probationer only if the alternative measures are deemed inadequate to meet the State’s interests in punishment and deterrence. *676Ante, at 672-673. There is no support in our cases or, in my view, the Constitution, for this novel requirement.
The Court suggests, ante, at 673, n. 12, that if the sentencing court rejects nonprison alternatives as “inadequate,” it is “impractical” to impose a prison term roughly equivalent to the fine in terms of achieving punishment goals. Hence, I take it, that had the trial court in this case rejected nonprison alternatives, the sentence it imposed would be constitutionally impregnable. Indeed, there would be no bounds on the length of the imprisonment that could be imposed, other than those imposed by the Eighth Amendment. But Williams v. Illinois, 399 U. S. 235 (1970), and Tate v. Short, 401 U. S. 395 (1971), stand for the proposition that such “automatic” conversion of a fine into a jail term is forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause, and by so holding, the Court in those cases was surely of the view that there is a way of converting a fine into a jail term that is not “automatic.” In building a superstructure of procedural steps that sentencing courts must follow, the Court seems to forget its own concern about imprisoning an indigent person for failure to pay a fine.
In this case, in view of the long prison term imposed, the state court obviously did not find that the sentence was “a rational and necessary trade-off to punish the individual who possesse[d] no accumulated assets”, Williams v. Illinois, supra, at 265 (Harlan, J., concurring). Accordingly, I concur in the judgment.