Court Opinion

ID: 9419290
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:48:29.115918+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:17.264241
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring:
I agree with the decision of the Court. But it seems to me that the plea of double jeopardy should be rejected on a ground other than that taken by the Court. In all other respects I join in its opinion.
This is a qui tam action under R. S. § 3490 to recover a “forfeiture” and “double the amount of damages which the United States may have sustained” by reason of the same acts of fraud for which the respondents were previously indicted under § 37 of the Criminal Code, 18 U. S. C. 1 88, and for which substantial fines were imposed upon them. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person shall “be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of fife or limb.” The respondents invoke this provision as a bar to this suit; and as I understand its holding, the Court rejects this plea of double jeopardy by treating the present action as one merely to make the United States whole for actual loss, and therefore without any punitive elements. The Court reaches this conclusion by applying the distinction taken in Helvering v. Mitchell, 303 U. S. 391, 400, between “sanctions that are remedial and those that are punitive.” The argument seems to run thus: Double jeopardy means attempting to punish criminally twice; this is not an attempt to punish criminally because it is a civil proceeding; it is a civil proceeding because, as a matter of “statutory construction,” it is a “civil sanction” which is being enforced here; and the sanction is “civil” because it is “remedial” and not “punitive” in nature.
*554Such dialectical subtleties may serve well enough for purposes of explaining away uncritical language in earlier cases. See, for instance, United States v. Chouteau, 102 U. S. 603, Coffey v. United States, 116 U. S. 436, and United States v. La Franca, 282 U. S. 568. But they are too subtle when the problem is one of safeguarding the humane interests for the protection of which the double jeopardy clause was written into the Fifth Amendment.
Punitive ends may be pursued in civil proceedings, and, conversely, the criminal process is frequently employed to attain remedial rather than punitive ends. It is for this reason that scienter has not been deemed to be a requirement in some criminal prosecutions. “Many instances of this are to be found in regulatory measures in the exercise of what is called the police power where the emphasis of the statute is evidently upon achievement of some social betterment rather than the punishment of the crimes . . .” United States v. Balint, 258 U. S. 250, 252.
The protection against twice being punished for the same offense should hardly be made to depend upon the necessarily speculative judgment of a court whether a “forfeiture” and “double the amount of damages which the United States may have sustained” constitutes an extra penalty, or merely an indemnity for loss suffered. If that is the issue on which the protection against double jeopardy turns, those who invoke the Constitution, as do the respondents here, ought to be allowed to prove that, as a matter of fact, the forfeiture and the double damages are punitive because they exceed any amount that could reasonably be regarded as the equivalent of compensation for the Government’s loss. That in civil actions punitive damages are, as a matter of due process, sometimes allowed, see Shevlin-Carpenter Co. v. Minnesota, 218 U. S. 57, 69-70, or that there may be distinct penal and remedial provisions for the same wrong, see O’Sullivan v. Felix, 233 *555U. S. 318, 325, does not help solve our present problem, which arises when a second separate proceeding against the same persons for the same misconduct results in a plea based upon the double jeopardy clause. We must also put to one side the doctrine of res judicata. This is largely a judicial doctrine, though partly reflected in the Full Faith and Credit Clause, Article IV, § 1, and is aimed at avoiding the waste and vexation of relitigating issues already decided between the same parties. The doctrine of double jeopardy has a different history. It is part of the protection of the Constitution against pressures and penalties that offend civilized notions of justice.
In my view the proper approach to the problem of double jeopardy in a situation like this, where Congress has imposed two sanctions for misconduct, however one may label them, and has provided for their enforcement in two separate proceedings, is that which was taken by Judge (later Mr. Justice) Blatchford in In re Leszynsky, 16 Blatchf. 9. The short of it is that where two such proceedings merely carry out the remedies which Congress has prescribed in advance for a wrong, they do not twice put a man in jeopardy for the same offense. Congress thereby merely allows the comprehensive penalties which it has imposed to be enforced in separate suits instead of in a single proceeding. By doing this Congress does not impose more than a single punishment. And the double jeopardy clause does not prevent Congress from prescribing such a procedure for the vindication of punitive remedies.
This view commends itself to reason. It is confirmed by history. For legislation of this character, providing two sanctions for the same misconduct, enforceable in separate proceedings, one a conventional criminal prosecution, and the other a forfeiture proceeding or a civil action as upon a debt, was quite common when the Fifth Amendment was framed by Congress. See, e. g., the ma*556terials referred to in In re Leszynsky, supra, at 16-19. Like other specific provisions of the Constitution, the double jeopardy clause must be read in the context of its times. It would do violence to proper regard for the framers of the Fifth Amendment to assume that they contemporaneously enacted and continued to enact legislation that was offensive to the guarantees of the double jeopardy clause which they had proposed for ratification.
If it be suggested that a succession of separate trials for the enforcement of a great number of criminal sanctions, even though set forth in advance in a single statute, might be a form of cruelty or oppression, the answer is that the Constitution itself has guarded against such an attempt “to wear the accused out by a multitude of cases with accumulated trials,” see Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U. S. 319, 328, by prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishments.” Amendment VIII. But short of that which would offend the Eighth Amendment, statutes prescribing cumulative remedies have been commonplaces in the history of federal legislation. The Sherman Law, for example, allows four means of redressing a single offense — criminal prosecution, injunction, seizure of goods, and treble damages. If a qui tam action like the one now before us were to be provided by Congress as a further deterrent against violation of the Sherman Law, it would certainly be commonly regarded as an additional punishment. But the double jeopardy clause would nevertheless not come into play.
It is for these reasons that I think the plea of double jeopardy in this case cannot be sustained.