CONSTITUTION OF THE USA

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Application and Scope

"Difficulty would attend the effort to define with exactness the extent of the constitutional provision which provides that cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted; but it is safe to affirm that punishments of torture [such as drawing and quartering, embowelling alive, beheading, public dissecting, and burning alive], and all others in the same line of unnecessary cruelty, are forbidden by that amendment to the Constitution."50

In upholding capital punishment inflicted by a firing squad, the Court not only looked to traditional practices but examined the history of executions in the territory concerned, the military practice, and current writings on the death penalty.51 Relying on the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause rather than the Eighth Amendment, the Court next approved electrocution as a permissible method of administering punishment.52 Many years later, a divided Court, assuming the applicability of the Eighth Amendment to the States, held that a second electrocution following a mechanical failure at the first which injured but did not kill the condemned man did not violate the proscription.53

Divestiture of the citizenship of a natural born citizen was held to be cruel and unusual punishment in Trop v. Dulles.54 The Court viewed divestiture as a penalty more cruel and "more primitive than torture," inasmuch as it entailed statelessness or "the total destruction of the individual's status in organized society." "The question is whether [a] penalty subjects the individual to a fate forbidden by the principle of civilized treatment guaranteed by the Eighth Amendment." A punishment must be examined "in light of the basic prohibition against inhuman treatment," and the Amendment was intended to preserve the "basic concept . . . [of] the dignity of man" by assuring that the power to impose punishment is "exercised within the limits of civilized standards."55chanrobles-red

50 Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130, 135 (1878).

51 Hanging was the other method of execution commonly used at the time, and implicitly approved by the Court.

52 In re Kemmler, 136 U.S. 436 (1890).

53 Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U.S. 459 (1947). Justice Frankfurter tested the issue by due process standards. Id. at 470 (concurring). Years earlier the Court, although recognizing that the Eight Amendment was then inapplicable to the states, opined in dictum that a fine and brief imprisonment for illegal sale of alcohol was not cruel and unusual punishment. Pervear v. Commonwealth, 72 U.S. (5 Wall.) 475, 479-80 (1867).

54 356 U.S. 86 (1958). Again the Court was divided. Four Justices joined the plurality opinion while Justice Brennan concurred on the ground that the requisite relation between the severity of the penalty and legitimate purpose under the war power was not apparent. Id. at 114. Four Justices dissented, denying that denationalization was a punishment and arguing that instead it was merely a means by which Congress regulated discipline in the armed forces. Id. at 121, 124-27.

55 356 U.S. at 99-100. The action of prison guards in handcuffing a prisoner to a hitching post for long periods of time violated basic human dignity and constituted "gratuitous infliction of 'wanton and unnecessary pain"' prohibited by the Clause. Hope v. Pelzer, 122 S. Ct. 2508, 2515 (2002).






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