United States V. Bajakajian - Supreme Court Decision

Supreme Court Decision

The case was argued before the Supreme Court on November 4, 1997 and decided on June 22, 1998. The Opinion of the Court was delivered by Justice Clarence Thomas joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer. Justice Anthony Kennedy dissented, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor and Justice Scalia.

At issue was 18 U.S.C. § 982(a)(1) which provides that:

The court, in imposing sentence on a person convicted of an offense in violation of section . . . 5316, . . . shall order that the person forfeit to the United States any property, real or personal, involved in such offense, or any property traceable to such property.

As understood by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, this law allowed the forfeiture of all of the money that the respondent had tried to take out of the country. The question was whether this conflicted with the Eighth Amendment's provision that “excessive fines imposed.”

Although Thomas noted that the case was complicated by the fact that both federal law and the government's case in Bajakajian somewhat blurred the distinction between civil forfeiture and a fine intended to punish, it was clear in this case that punishment was at least part of the government's intent. However, the case allowed the Court to look at the issue of excessive fines apart from other criminal issues because there were no charges against the respondent other than the one that he had failed to report an amount of cash. The respondent had broken no other laws. (A separate charge of lying to customs officials had been dropped before the case had come to trial.) Indeed, Thomas chided the dissenters in the case for referring to the respondent as a smuggler. Also, the problem of what constituted an excessive fine or made it disproportionate to the crime need not be worked out in detail because the question in this case was whether the fine was grossly disproportionate.

“Comparing the gravity of respondent’s crime with the $357,144 forfeiture the Government seeks," Thomas wrote, "we conclude that such a forfeiture would be grossly disproportional to the gravity of his offense. It is larger than the $5,000 fine imposed by the District Court by many orders of magnitude, and it bears no articulable correlation to any injury suffered by the Government. … For the foregoing reasons, the full forfeiture of respondent’s currency would violate the Excessive Fines Clause.”