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Stinneford argues that the word unusual in the Eighth Amendment has a very different meaning in comparison to those who use originalism to interpret the U.S. Constitution. He writes: "But in reality, the word 'unusual' in the Eighth Amendment did not originally mean 'rare'– it meant 'contrary to long usage', or 'new'.
Pulley v. Harris, 465 U.S. 37 (1984), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution does not require, as an invariable rule in every case, that a state appellate court, before it affirms a death sentence, proportionally compare the sentence in the case before it with the penalties imposed in similar cases if requested ...
Helm, 463 U.S. 277 (1983), was a United States Supreme Court case concerned with the scope of the Eighth Amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishment. Mr. Mr. Helm, who had written a check from a fictitious account and had reached his seventh nonviolent felony conviction since 1964, received a mandatory sentence, under South Dakota ...
Chief Justice Burger, joined by Justice Rehnquist dissented because he believed that the proportionality principle the Court had engrafted onto the Eighth Amendment encroached too much on the legislative power of the states. Burger preferred to concentrate on the narrow facts of the case: Coker had raped three women, and killed one.
Because so few Eighth Amendment cases make it to the appeals stage, we were able to pull all opinions that fit these parameters over the course of five years — from 2018 to 2022 — spanning two ...
Proportionality is a general principle in law which covers several separate (although related) concepts: . The concept of proportionality is used as a criterion of fairness and justice in statutory interpretation processes, especially in constitutional law, as a logical method intended to assist in discerning the correct balance between the restriction imposed by a corrective measure and the ...
Forthcoming in our series on the Eighth Amendment: The gutting of the Eighth Amendment. Debunking the myth of 'frivolous' prisoner suits. The Supreme Court's 'deliberate indifference' trap.
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.