United States v. Bajakajian

United States v. Bajakajian, 524 U.S. 321 (1998), is a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States regarding the Excessive Fines clause of the Eighth Amendment. This case is the only occasion on which the Supreme Court has held that an imposed fine was unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment.

Background

In 1993, Hosep Krikor Bajakajian had attempted to leave the United States with $357,144 without reporting this to customs officials as required by 31 U.S.C. § 5316, which requires the reporting of all international movements of currency with value in excess of $10,000. The Government sought forfeiture of the entirety of the $357,144. None of the money was found to have been connected with any other criminal action whatsoever. Bajakajian was traveling to Cyprus via Italy, and the cash was intended to pay a debt. He was also initially charged with lying to customs, but this charge was dropped.

Bajakajian pleaded guilty to failure to report and opted for a bench trial on the forfeiture of the $357,144. A United States district court judge found the forfeiture of the whole $357,144 to be grossly disproportionate and in violation of the Eighth Amendment. He ordered forfeiture of $15,000 in addition to the maximum fine of $5,000 and three years probation for failure to report. Bajakajian had been eligible for six months in prison, but the Judge did not impose this sentence.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the decision of the District Court and in fact stated its willingness to go further by ruling that the forfeiture of any of the currency was unconstitutional. Unfortunately for Bajakajian, he had not appealed the forfeiture to the Ninth Circuit and they were thus unable to set it aside.

Opinion of the Court

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 [not be] 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.”

External links

• 524 U.S. 321 Full text of the opinion at Findlaw.com