What Supreme Court Case Relates to the 8th Amendment ?
Question by thalia: what supreme court case relates to the 8th amendment ?
I’m doing a presentation in my history class and I need to know a lot if information about the 8th amendment bill of rights . Pleasee help mee !
Best answer:
Answer by Elizabeth
Many Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decisions are concerned with the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits the government from imposing excessive bail or fines, or “cruel and unusual punishments” (such as torture).
One famous and important case is Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958). Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the SCOTUS ruled, 5-4, that it was unconstitutional for the government to revoke the citizenship of a natural-born U.S. citizen as a form of punishment. Chief Justice Warren wrote that “The [Eighth] Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
In the dissent, Justice Felix Frankfurter noted that military desertion (which is what Albert Trop did) can be punished by the death penalty; he asked “Is constitutional dialectic so empty of reason that it can be seriously urged that loss of citizenship is a fate worse than death?”
Chief Justice Warren’s reference to “evolving standards of decency” is often cited as precedent in the court’s interpretation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
There are many fascinating cases that have to do with the Eighth Amendment; if this one doesn’t do it for you, check out Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972) (very significant in many ways — delineates four principles by which we may determine whether a particular punishment is “cruel and unusual” ), Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1878) (this one mentions drawing and quartering!), Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994) (an important ruling on prisoner rape), and so forth.
I hope that this is helpful to you.
Answer by History_101
The real “cruel and unusual punishment” cases appear before and a little after the beginning of the 1900s.
Furman v. Georgia and the subsequent cases are solely concerned with the capital punishment, which truly are not “cruel or unusual punishment” but human rights cases.
Here are the other cases:
In Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349 (1910), marked the first time that the Supreme Court exercised judicial review to overturn a criminal sentence as cruel and unusual. The Court overturned a punishment called cadena temporal, which mandated “hard and painful labor,” shackling for the duration of incarceration, and permanent civil disabilities. This case originated out of the Philippines. As a possession or territory of the United States, this case made its way to the Supreme Court.
In Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958), the Court held that punishing a natural-born citizen for a crime by taking away his citizenship is unconstitutional, being “more primitive than torture” because it involved the “total destruction of the individual’s status in organized society.”
In Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962), the Court decided 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.
In Powell v. Texas, 392 U.S. 514 (1968), the Court upheld a statute barring public intoxication by distinguishing Robinson on the basis that Powell dealt with a person who was drunk in public, not merely for being addicted to alcohol.
In Solem v. Helm, 463 U.S. 277 (1983), that the Supreme Court held that incarceration, standing alone, could constitute cruel and unusual punishment if it were “disproportionate” in duration 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 Solem test and held that for non-capital sentences, the Eighth Amendment only constrains the length of prison terms by a “gross disproportionality principle.” Under this principle, the Court sustained a mandatory sentence of life without parole imposed for possession of 672 grams or more of cocaine.
In Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. ___ (2010), the Supreme Court declared that a life sentence without any chance of parole, for a crime other than murder, is cruel and unusual punishment for a minor. Two years later, in Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. ___ (2012), the Court went further, holding that mandatory life sentences without parole cannot be imposed on minors, even for homicide.
In Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977), the Court declared that the death penalty was unconstitutionally excessive for rape of a woman and, by implication, for any crime where a death does not occur. The majority in Coker stated that “death is indeed a disproportionate penalty for the crime of raping an adult woman.”
In Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008), the Court extended the reasoning of Coker by ruling that the death penalty was excessive for child rape “where the victim’s life was not taken.”
In Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1878), the Court stated that death by firing squad was not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.
In Rummel v. Estelle, 445 U.S. 263 (1980), the Court upheld a life sentence with the possibility of parole imposed per Texas’s three strikes law for fraud crimes totaling $ 230. A few months after pleading guilty Rummel was released.
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 50 years to life sentence with the possibility of parole imposed under California’s three strikes law when the defendant was convicted of shoplifting videotapes worth a total of about $ 150.
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This is the easiest method to distinguish and understand how the Court has defined the parameters of the Eighth Amendment which is generally covered more in depth in graduate and doctoral courses and law schools. Otherwise, you will always see a focus on capital punishment. Initially “cruel and unusual punishment” stood alone and over time became coupled with the Due Process Clause(s) of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. See source below.
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