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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."
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.
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 ...
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 ...
Enmund v. Florida, 458 U.S. 782 (1982), is a United States Supreme Court case. It was a 5–4 decision in which the United States Supreme Court applied its capital proportionality principle, to set aside the death penalty for the driver of a getaway car, in a robbery-murder of an elderly Floridian couple. [1]
But among prisoner Eighth Amendment lawsuits, only 14% settle, and less than 1% win in court. Most civil suits settle in the outside world. But among prisoner Eighth Amendment lawsuits, only 14% ...
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 ...