The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” This amendment prohibits the federal government from imposing unduly harsh penalties on criminal defendants, either as the price for obtaining pretrial release or as punishment for crime after conviction.
The Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause is the most important and controversial part of the Eighth Amendment. In some ways, the Clause is shrouded in mystery. What does it mean for a punishment to be “cruel and unusual”? How do we measure a punishment’s cruelty? And if a punishment is cruel, why should we care whether it is “unusual”?
We do know some things about the history of the phrase “cruel and unusual punishments.” In 1689 – a full century before the ratification of the United States Constitution – England adopted a Bill of Rights that prohibited “cruell and unusuall punishments.” In 1776, George Mason included a prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments in the Declaration of Rights he drafted for the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 1791, this same prohibition became the central component of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
When the United States Constitution was first ratified by the states, it did not contain a Bill of Rights, and it did not prohibit cruel and unusual punishments. These protections were not added until after the Constitution was ratified. The debates that occurred while the states were deciding whether to ratify the Constitution shed some light on the meaning of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, because they show why many people thought this Clause was needed.
The proposed Constitution made the federal government much more powerful than it had been under the Articles of Confederation. One of the most significant of these new powers was the power to create federal crimes and to punish those who committed them. Opponents of the Constitution feared that this new power would allow Congress to use cruel punishments as a tool for oppressing the people. For example, Abraham Holmes argued that Congress might repeat the abuses of “that diabolical institution, the Inquisition,” and start imposing torture on those convicted of federal crimes: “They are nowhere restrained from inventing the most cruel and unheard-of punishments, and annexing them to crimes; and there is no constitutional check on them, but that racks and gibbets may be amongst the most mild instruments of their discipline.” Patrick Henry asserted, even more pointedly than Holmes, that the lack of a prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments meant that Congress could use punishment as a tool of oppression: “Congress . . . . may introduce the practice of France, Spain, and Germany of torturing, to extort a confession of the crime. They . . . will tell you that there is such a necessity of strengthening the arm of government, that they must . . . extort confession by torture, in order to punish with still more relentless severity. We are then lost and undone.” Largely as a result of these objections, the Constitution was amended to prohibit cruel and unusual punishments.
As these debates demonstrate, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause clearly prohibits “barbaric” methods of punishment. If the federal government tried to bring back the rack, or thumbscrews, or gibbets as instruments of punishment, such efforts would pretty clearly violate the Eighth Amendment. Most people also agree that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause now limits state power as well as federal power, because the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits states from abridging “the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” and from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
But once we get beyond these areas of agreement, there are many areas of passionate disagreement concerning the meaning and application of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause:
First and foremost, what standard should the Court use in deciding whether a punishment is unconstitutionally cruel? Should it look to the standards of 1791, when the Eighth Amendment was adopted? Should it look to contemporary public opinion? Should it exercise its own moral judgment, irrespective of whether it is supported by societal consensus? Should it look to some other standard?
Second, does the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause only prohibit barbaric methods of punishment, or does it also prohibit punishments that are disproportionate to the offense? For example, would it violate the Eighth Amendment to impose a life sentence for a parking violation?
Third, does the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause prohibit the death penalty? Many argue that capital punishment fails to advance any public good, that it is of a past era, and it should be eliminated. Proponents of the death penalty argue that some people have committed such atrocious crimes that they deserve death, and that the death penalty may deter others from committing atrocious crimes. They also point out that the punishment is authorized in a majority of states, and public opinion polls continue to show broad support for it.
Finally, are some modern methods of punishment – such as the extended use of solitary confinement, or the use of a three-drug “cocktail” to execute offenders – sufficiently “barbaric” to violate the Eighth Amendment?
There is not time or space here to answer all these questions, but the essays that follow will demonstrate differing ways of approaching several of them.
