Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Amendment VIII (the Eighth Amendment) of the United States Constitution, which is part of the U.S. Bill of Rights, prohibits excessive bail or fines, as well as cruel and unusual punishment. The phrases employed are taken from the English Bill of Rights.

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Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Excessive bail

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Cruel and unusual punishments

The use of the word and (instead of or) has been held to have some significance. Cruel punishments are allowable as long as more than one court system applies the punishment. Similarly, unusual punishments are permitted so long as they are not cruel, although some lawyers would argue that any unusual punishment is cruel. Thus, for example, three strikes laws have been upheld by the Court as not conflicting with this clause, because even if they are unusual, they are not cruel (in the sense that there is no physical torture).

The Eighth Amendment forbids some punishments entirely, and forbids some punishments that are excessive when compared to the crime.Chad

In Furman v. Georgia (1972), Justice Brennan wrote, "There are, then, four principles by which we may determine whether a particular punishment is 'cruel and unusual'."

The "essential predicate" is "that a punishment must not by its severity be degrading to human dignity," especially torture.
"A severe punishment that is obviously inflicted in wholly arbitrary fashion."
"A severe punishment that is clearly and totally rejected throughout society."
"A severe punishment that is patently unnecessary."

Continuing, he wrote that he expected that no state would pass a law obviously violating any one of these principles, so court decisions regarding the Eighth Amendment would involve a "cumulative" analysis of the implication of each of the four principles.

Punishments completely forbidden

In Wilkerson v. Utah (1878, pertaining to methods of capital punishment), the Supreme Court commented that drawing and quartering, public dissecting, burning alive and disemboweling would constitute cruel and unusual punishment while determining that death by firing squad was as legitimate as the common method of that time, hanging.

Because it is the needless infliction of pain, torture is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

The Court held in the case Trop v. Dulles (1958) that punishing a natural born citizen for a crime by taking away his citizenship is unconstitutionally excessive, being "more primitive than torture" because it involved the "total destruction of the individual's status in organized society".

In Robinson v. California (1962), the Court decided, 6-2, that a California law authorizing a 90-day jail sentence for "be[ing] addicted to the use of narcotics" violated the Eighth Amendment, as narcotics addiction "is apparently an illness", and California was attempting to punish people based on the state of this illness, rather than for any specific act.

Punishments forbidden as excessive

Weems v. United States (1910) held that a punishment is cruel and unusual if it is excessive. (The Weems case dealt with a sentence of cadena temporal, a punishment which mandated "hard and painful labor", shackling for the duration of incarceration, and permanent civil disabilities.)

In Coker v. Georgia (1977), the Court declared that the death penalty was unconstitutionally excessive for rape of an adult female and, by implication, for any crime other than murder. However, some states are challenging this rule^[1] by enacting a death penalty statute for repeat child molesters.

Traditionally, the length of a prison sentence was not subject to scrutiny under the Eighth Amendment, regardless of the crime for which the sentence was imposed. It was not until the case of Solem v. Helm (1983) that the Supreme Court held that incarceration, standing alone, could constitute cruel and unusual punishment if it were "disproportionate" in duration with respect to the offense. The Court outlined three factors that were to be considered in determining if the sentence is excessive: "(i) the gravity of the offense and the harshness of the penalty; (ii) the sentences imposed on other criminals in the same jurisdiction; and (iii) the sentences imposed for commission of the same crime in other jurisdictions." The Court held that in the circumstances of the case before it and the factors to be considered, a sentence of life imprisonment without parole for cashing a $100 check on a closed account was cruel and unusual. However, in Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957 (1991), a fractured Court retreated from the strong test announced in Solem and held that for noncapital sentences, the Eighth Amendment only constrains the length of prison terms by a "gross disproportionality principle." Under this gross disproportionality principle, the Court sustained a mandatory sentence of life without parole imposed for possession of 650 grams or more of cocaine.

Capital punishment

Aside from the period 1972 to 1976, when the death penalty was not suspended, the Supreme Court's consistent ruling has been that capital punishment itself is not a violation of the Eighth Amendment, but that many applications have been. The Court declared the execution of the mentally retarded to be unconstitutionally cruel and unusual in Atkins v. Virginia (2002), and in Roper v. Simmons (2005) it declared the death penalty unconstitutionally cruel and unusual for people who were under age 18 at the time of their crime.

The constitutionality of capital punishment itself is often challenged, usually on the grounds that it allegedly violates the Eighth Amendment. In Wilkerson v. Utah, the Supreme Court stated that death by firing squad was not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The first significant challenge to reach the Court was Furman v. Georgia (1972), when the Supreme Court overturned the death sentences of Furman as well as two defendants in separate cases against Georgia and Texas, in a 5-4 decision. Of the five justices voting to overturn the death penalty cases, two found capital punishment itself to be unconstitutionally cruel and unusual; and three found that the death penalty was meted out in a random and capricious fashion, discriminating against blacks and the poor. This, they said, made the application of the death penalty cruel and unusual.

States with capital punishment rewrote the laws to address the Supreme Court's findings, and in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), the Court found, in a 7-2 ruling, that Georgia's new death penalty laws passed Eighth Amendment scrutiny: a bifurcated trial in which guilt and sentence were determined separately; and "there must be specific jury findings as to the circumstances of the crime or the character of the defendant, and the State Supreme Court thereafter reviews the comparability of each death sentence with the sentences imposed on similarly situated defendants to ensure that the sentence of death in a particular case is not disproportionate". Executions resumed in 1977.

Some states have passed laws imposing mandatory death penalties in certain cases; the Supreme Court has found these laws to be unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. Other statutes specifying factors for courts to use in making their decisions have been upheld. Some have not: in Godfrey v. Georgia (1980), the Supreme Court overturned a sentence based upon a finding that a murder was "outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible, and inhuman," as it deemed that any murder may be reasonably characterized in this manner. Similarly, in Maynard v. Cartwright (1988), the Court found that an "especially heinous, atrocious or cruel" standard was too vague. However, the vagueness of this language depends on how lower courts interpret it. In Walton v. Arizona, 497 U.S. 639 (1990), the Court found that the phrase "especially heinous, cruel, or depraved" was not vague because the state supreme court had expounded on its meaning.

Nevertheless, under the proportionality principle embodied in the Eighth Amendment, the Court has found that the death penalty may not be imposed for the crime of rape of an adult woman,^[2] for felony murder where the defendant was a minor participant in the crime,^[3] and on mentally retarded^[4] and juvenile offenders.^[5]

Punishments allowed

In Rummel v. Estelle, 445 U.S. 263 (1980), the Court upheld a life sentence with the possibility of parole for fraud crimes totaling $230.

In Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957 (1991), the Court upheld a life sentence without the possibility of parole for possession of 672 grams of cocaine.

In Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003), the Court upheld a sentence imposed under California's three-strikes law when the defendant was convicted of shoplifting videotapes worth a total of $150.

References

External links

[1] Dallas Morning News article

[2] Coker v. Georgia

[3] Felony Murder and the Death Penalty

[4] Atkins v. Virginia

[5] Roper v. Simmons

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