Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962), is the first landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution was interpreted to prohibit criminalization of particular acts or conduct, as contrasted with prohibiting the use of a particular form of punishment for a crime.
The Eighth Amendment, which bars "cruel and unusual punishments," was intended by the founders as a bulwark against prisoner abuse. Over the years it came to mean any treatment that "shocked the ...
The Eighth Amendment was adopted, as part of the Bill of Rights, in 1791.It is almost identical to a provision in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, in which Parliament declared, "as their ancestors in like cases have usually done ... that excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
Most civil suits settle in the outside world. But among prisoner Eighth Amendment lawsuits, only 14% settle, and less than 1% win in court.
Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003), [1] decided the same day as Ewing v. California (a case with a similar subject matter), [2] held that there would be no relief by means of a petition for a writ of habeas corpus from a sentence imposed under California's three strikes law as a violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments.
Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6–3 that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments, but that states can define who has an intellectual disability.
In that case, the 9th Circuit ruled in 2018 that such prosecutions would violate the Eighth Amendment. In its 2022 ruling, the same court extended that reasoning to civil penalties, prompting the ...
For this reason, O'Connor reasoned that Ewing's 25-years-to-life sentence did not violate the Eighth Amendment. Justice Scalia was willing to accept that the Eighth Amendment contained a gross disproportionality requirement "if I felt I could intelligently apply it." However, because a criminal sentence can have many justifications—not simply ...