A new test for evaluating Eighth Amendment challenges to lethal injections.

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...

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...

Raising the "civilized minimum" of pain amelioration for prisoners to avoid cruel and unusual punishment.

This Article addresses the problems with our nation's cultural and legal prohibitions against certain pain management treatments. The practice of pain management has not kept pace with the many medical advances that have made it possible for physicians to ameliorate most pain. The Author notes that some patients are denied access to certain forms of treatments due to the mistaken belief that ad...

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

Cruelty to the mentally ill: an Eighth Amendment challenge to the abolition of the insanity defense.

This Comment addresses the present gap in insanity-defense laws created by the defense’s abolition and offers an Eighth Amendment based remedy. Part I reviews the history and evolution of the insanity defense in Anglo-American law. It then describes how four states have statutorily abolished the defense. It concludes with a discussion of Clark v. Arizona, the Court’s most recent decision on the...