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Sentencing and Penalties Judicial discretion and mandatory minimums, drug conspiracy penalties and double jeopardy - all of these can be found in this section. Pages: ‹1› ‹2› ‹3› ‹4› ‹5› ‹6› ‹7› ‹8› ‹9› ‹10› ‹11› ‹12› ‹13›
The State and Federal Governments spend vast sums on drug control activities. See, e. g., U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Fact Sheet: Drug Data Summary 5 (Apr. 1994) (approximately $ 27 billion in fiscal year 1991). The Kurths are directly responsible for some of these expenditures -- the costs of detecting, investigating, and raiding their operation, the price of prosecuting them and incarcerating those who received prison sentences, and part of the money spent on drug abuse education, deterrence, and treatment. The State of Montana has a legitimate nonpunitive interest in defraying the costs of such activities.
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...[T]he Court holds that imposition of the drug tax is always punitive, regardless of the nature of the offense or the offender. The consequences of this decision are astounding. The State of Montana -- along with about half of the other States -- is now precluded from ever imposing the drug tax on a person who has been punished for a possessory drug offense. A defendant who is arrested, tried, and convicted for possession of one ounce of marijuana cannot be taxed $100 therefore, even though the State's law enforcement costs in such a case average more than $4,000. See Montana Criminal Justice Expenditures 24. Moreover, presumably the State cannot tax anyone for possession of illegal drugs without providing the full panoply of criminal procedure protections found in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, given the Court's holding that "the proceeding Montana initiated to collect a tax on the possession of drugs was the functional equivalent of a successive criminal prosecution."
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Today's decision is entirely unnecessary to preserve individual liberty, because the Excessive Fines Clause is available to protect criminals from governmental overreaching. [...] On the other hand, today's decision will be felt acutely by law-abiding taxpayers, because it will seriously undermine the ability of the State and Federal Governments to collect recompense for the immense costs criminals impose on our society.
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It is time to [...] acknowledge what the text of the Constitution makes perfectly clear: the Double Jeopardy Clause prohibits successive prosecution, not successive punishment. Multiple punishment is of course restricted by the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause insofar as its nature is concerned, and by the Excessive Fines Clause insofar as its cumulative extent is concerned.
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Taxes imposed upon illegal activities are fundamentally different from taxes with a pure revenue-raising purpose that are imposed despite their adverse effect on the taxed activity. But they differ as well from mixed-motive taxes that governments impose both to deter a disfavored activity and to raise money. By imposing cigarette taxes, for example, a government wants to discourage smoking. But because the product's benefits -- such as creating employment, satisfying consumer demand, and providing tax revenues -- are regarded as outweighing the harm, that government will allow the manufacture, sale, and use of cigarettes as long as the manufacturers, sellers, and smokers pay high taxes that reduce consumption and increase government revenue. These justifications vanish when the taxed activity is completely forbidden, for the legitimate revenue-raising purpose that might support such a tax could be equally well served by increasing the fine imposed upon conviction.
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