There are quite a few places in the JDK that call SecurityManager.checkPermission, catch the SecurityException, and then do something other than propagating the SecurityException, ex:

try {
    sm.checkPermission(...);
    return true;
} catch (SecurityException e) {}
    return false;
}

For cases like this, to avoid the overhead of throwing and catching the exception, it would be better to have a different checkPermission method that returns a boolean, ex:

public boolean isGranted(Permission perm)