# Austin v. United States

> Supreme Court of the United States · June 28, 1993 · 509 U.S. 602

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9432894

## Case

- **Full name:** Austin v. United States
- **Court:** Supreme Court of the United States
- **Decided:** June 28, 1993
- **Citations:** 509 U.S. 602; 113 S. Ct. 2801; 125 L. Ed. 2d 488; 1993 U.S. LEXIS 4407; 1993 WL 224465
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Concurrence by Kennedy
- **Judges:** Blackmun, White, Stevens, O'Connor, Souter, Scalia, Kennedy, Rehnquist, Thomas
- **Cited by:** 1,538 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- **Yellow flag:** Reported overruled by United States v. Bajakajian, 524 U.S. 321 (1998) — not on the Supreme Court's list.
- Negative treatments: 2
- Distinguished by: 12
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9432894

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- finding that civil forfeiture action seeking forfeiture of convicted drug dealer’s home and business was subject to Excessive Fines Clause and noting that the Clause “limits the government’s power to extract payments … as punishment for some offense.” (second emphasis added an…
- holding that the forfeiture of conveyances and real property pursuant to §§ 881(a)(4) and (a)(7) constituted punishment because under the statute the amount forfeited "can vary so dramatically that any relationship between the Government's actual costs and the amount of the sa…
- holding that “[w]e need not exclude the possibility that a forfeiture serves remedial purposes to conclude that it is subject to the limitations of the Excessive Fines Clause. We, however, must determine that it can only be explained as serving in part to punish.”
- holding that restitution is a criminal penalty that negates the imposition of prejudgment interest
- explaining that “[b]oth theories [underlying common law forfeiture] rest, at bottom, on the notion that the owner has been negligent in allowing his property to be misused and that he is properly punished for that negligence”

## Opinion text

Justice Kennedy,
with whom
The Chief Justice and Justice Thomas join, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I am in substantial agreement with Part I of Justice Scalia’s opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. I share Justice Scalia’s belief that Part III of the Court’s opinion is quite unnecessary for the decision of the case, fails to support the Court's argument, and seems rather doubtful as well.
In recounting the law’s history, we risk anachronism if we attribute to an earlier time an intent to employ legal con *629 cepts that had not yet evolved. I see something of that in the Court’s opinion here, for in its eagerness to discover a unified theory of forfeitures, it recites a consistent rationale of personal punishment that neither the cases nor other narratives of the common law suggest. For many of the reasons explained by Justice Scalia, I am not convinced that all in rem forfeitures were on account of the owner’s blameworthy conduct. Some impositions of in rem forfeiture may have been designed either to remove property that was itself causing injury, see, e. g., Harmony v. United States, 2 How. 210, 233 (1844), or to give the court jurisdiction over an asset that it could control in order to make injured parties whole, see Republic Nat. Bank of Miami v. United States, 506 U. S. 80, 87 (1992).
At some point, we may have to confront the constitutional question whether forfeiture is permitted when the owner has committed no wrong of any sort, intentional or negligent. That for me would raise a serious question. Though the history of forfeiture laws might not be determinative of that issue, it would have an important bearing on the outcome. I would reserve for that or some other necessary occasion the inquiry the Court undertakes here. Unlike Justice Scalia, see ante, at 625, I would also reserve the question whether in rem forfeitures always amount to an intended punishment of the owner of forfeited property.
With these observations, I concur in part and concur in the judgment.

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9432894. Public record. Not legal advice.