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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 ...
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."
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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 does not allow prisons to be modern-day settings for Lord of the Flies," Judge Robin Rosenbaum wrote in a scathing dissent. By not holding officials responsible, she said ...
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 ...