Eighth Amendment To The United States Constitution - Excessive Fines

Excessive Fines

In United States v. Bajakajian, 524 U.S. 321 (1998), the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to take $357,144 from a person who failed to report his taking of more than $10,000 in U.S. currency out of the United States. In what was the first case in which the Supreme Court ruled a fine to violate the Excessive Fines Clause, the Court held that it was "grossly disproportional" to take all of the money which Mr. Bajakajian attempted to take out of the United States, in violation of a federal law that required him to report an amount in excess of $10,000. In describing what constituted "gross disproportionality," the Court could not find any guidance from the history of the Excessive Fines Clause and so relied on Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause case law:

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 appropriate 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 determination regarding the gravity of a particular criminal offense will be inherently imprecise. Both of these principles counsel 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 disproportionality articulated in our Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause precedents. See, e.g., Solem v. Helm, supra, at 288; Rummel v. Estelle, 445 U.S. 263, 271 (1980).