The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishments and excessive bail bonds. It was ratified in 1791 and supplemented by the 14th Amendment. The amendment outlawed punishments deemed excessive or removed from society’s values, and limited punishments degrading human dignity, arbitrary, rejected by society, or useless. The death sentence is controversial, and the amendment originally applied only to federal punishments and fines. The Robinson v. California case extended the clause to the states.
The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees citizens the right to be free from excessive bail bonds and cruel and unusual punishments. It was ratified along with the Bill of Rights and went into effect in 1791. It is supplemented by the 14th amendment and its Due Process clause, and borrows from England’s Bill of Rights 100 years earlier. It was first ratified in the United States in 1776 in the Virginia Declaration of Rights and combines with the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments to protect the rights of the accused.
The cruel and unusual punitive provisions of the Eighth Amendment outlawed punishments deemed excessive or removed from society’s values, including drawing and quartering, a practice that was popular across Europe at the time. It also prohibits the extreme punishments of disembowelment, public dissection, burning alive, and deprivation of citizenship. It allowed for the use of hanging and firing squad, although these have since been banned.
These punishments were limited first by the Eighth Amendment itself, and then by a 1972 Supreme Court decision, which enunciated four fundamental principles for governing the limitation of sentences. These principles limited punishments degrading human dignity, such as torture; those who are arbitrary; those who are clearly rejected by the majority of society; and those that are clearly useless.
The Supreme Courts have, in the past, declared many legal punishments too excessive in some cases under the Eighth Amendment. A punishment for hard and painful labor was overturned in 1910, as was a punishment for narcotic addiction in 1962, although life imprisonment was allowed for possession of large quantities of these drugs. Starting in 1983, the length of the sentences began to be questioned as cruel and unusual for the extent of the crime committed.
The death sentence is a particularly controversial aspect of the Eighth Amendment. The amendment provided for the restriction of capital punishment for the mentally disabled, those under the age of 18 and those who committed rape, which was met with much discussion. States soon changed their laws to match the Supreme Court rulings, with some states retaining the death penalty and others repealing it. The Supreme Court, in 1976, ordered the separation of the decisions of a verdict and a sentence.
The Eighth Amendment originally applied only to punishments and fines imposed by the federal government and the Supreme Court. The 1962 case Robinson v. California provided that the cruel and unusual punishment clause extended to the states as well. The Supreme Court, however, did not rule on whether the amendment’s other provisions also apply outside the federal government.
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