Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
[50] [51] Additionally, in Harmelin, Justice Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, said "the Eighth Amendment contains no proportionality guarantee," and that "what was 'cruel and unusual' under the Eighth Amendment was to be determined without reference to the particular offense." Scalia wrote "If 'cruel and unusual punishments' included ...
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.
Business Insider's analysis of a sample of nearly 1,500 Eighth Amendment cases — including every appeals court case with an opinion we could locate filed from 2018 to 2022 citing the relevant ...
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 ...
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 ...