Eighth Amendment. The Death Penalty

Perspectives on the Death Penalty: Judicial Behavior and the Eighth Amendment

Eighth Amendment Challenges After Baze v. Rees: Lethal Injection, Civil Rights Lawsuits, and the Death Penalty

In Baze v. Rees, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol, which utilizes a threedrug combination to execute death row inmates. To challenge a lethal injection protocol in the future, the Court stated that an inmate would have to make a showing that the protocol in question presents a “substantial risk of serious harm” or an “objectively intole...

Desert and the Eighth Amendment Symposium: Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Litigating under the Eighth Amendment

The Political Morality of the Eighth Amendment

Since the early twentieth century, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment as a progressive mandate that draws its meaning from “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” In applying this standard, the Court looks to such objective considerations as legislative enactments, patterns of jury dec...

Eighth Amendment--Pretrial Detention: What Will Become of the Innocent