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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."
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
The hoary doctrine of “proportionality” from the “just war” theory is being sorely tested by the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
Justice Stevens explained that a proportionality principle for non-capital sentences was compatible with the Eighth Amendment. After all, judges must determine the proportionality of fines, bail, and death sentences. There should be no reason why these lesser and greater forms of punishment should be subject to a proportionality requirement ...