The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects against imposing excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishments. This amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the United States Bill of Rights. The amendment serves as a limitation upon the state or federal government to impose unduly harsh penalties on criminal defendants before and after a conviction. This limitation applies equally to the price for obtaining pretrial release and the punishment for crime after conviction. The phrases in this amendment originated in the English Bill of Rights of 1689.
Cruelty is the pleasure in inflicting suffering or the inaction towards another's suffering when a clear remedy is readily available. Sadism can also be related to this form of action or concept. Cruel ways of inflicting suffering may involve violence, but affirmative violence is not necessary for an act to be cruel.
Cruel and unusual punishment is a phrase in common law describing punishment that is considered unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the person subjected to the sanction. The precise definition varies by jurisdiction, but typically includes punishments that are arbitrary, unnecessary, or overly severe compared to the crime.
Holt v. Sarver was a court decision that was the first in a series of American common law cases that have found entire state prison systems in violation of prisoners' constitutional rights by inflicting cruel and unusual punishment.
Gregg v. Georgia, Proffitt v. Florida, Jurek v. Texas, Woodson v. North Carolina, and Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. It reaffirmed the Court's acceptance of the use of the death penalty in the United States, upholding, in particular, the death sentence imposed on Troy Leon Gregg. The set of cases is referred to by a leading scholar as the July 2 Cases, and elsewhere referred to by the lead case Gregg. The court set forth the two main features that capital sentencing procedures must employ in order to comply with the Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and unusual punishments". The decision essentially ended the de facto moratorium on the death penalty imposed by the Court in its 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia 408 U.S. 238 (1972). Justice Brennan dissent famously argued that "The calculated killing of a human being by the State involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person's humanity... An executed person has indeed 'lost the right to have rights."
Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957 (1991), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause allowed a state to impose a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the possession of 672 grams (23.70 oz) of cocaine.
Gates v. Collier, 501 F.2d 1291, was a landmark decision of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that brought an end to the trusty system as well as flagrant inmate abuse at Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, in Sunflower County, Mississippi. It was the first case in a body of law developed in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals holding that a variety of forms of corporal punishment against prisoners constituted cruel and unusual punishment and a violation of Eighth Amendment rights. This case was also the first broad-scale intervention by a court in the supervision of prison practices.
Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003), decided the same day as Ewing v. California, held that there would be no relief by means of a petition for a writ of habeas corpus from a sentence imposed under California's three strikes law as a violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments. Relying on the reasoning of Ewing and Harmelin v. Michigan, the Court ruled that because no "clearly established" law held that a three-strikes sentence was cruel and unusual punishment, the 50-years-to-life sentence imposed in this case was not cruel and unusual punishment.
Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97 (1976), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States established the standard of what a prisoner must plead in order to claim a violation of Eighth Amendment rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Specifically, the Court held that a prisoner must allege acts or omissions sufficiently harmful to evidence deliberate indifference to serious medical needs. Though the Court credited Gamble's complaint that doctors had failed to provide appropriate care, it held that medical malpractice did not rise to the level of "cruel and unusual punishment" simply because the victim is a prisoner.
Baze v. Rees, 553 U.S. 35 (2008), is a decision by the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the constitutionality of a particular method of lethal injection used for capital punishment.
The "trusty system" was a penitentiary system of discipline and security enforced in parts of the United States until the 1980s, in which designated inmates were given various privileges, abilities, and responsibilities not available to all inmates.
Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1879), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court affirmed the judgment of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Utah in stating that execution by firing squad, as prescribed by the Utah territorial statute, was not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a prison official's "deliberate indifference" to a substantial risk of serious harm to an inmate violates the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment. Farmer built on two previous Supreme Court decisions addressing prison conditions, Estelle v. Gamble and Wilson v. Seiter. The decision marked the first time the Supreme Court directly addressed sexual assault in prisons.
Vincent Alfred Simmons is an American man who was a life prisoner at Angola State Prison in Louisiana, where he was sentenced to 100 years in July 1977 after being convicted of the "attempted aggravated rapes" of 14-year-old twin sisters Karen and Sharon Sanders of Marksville. Simmons has maintained his innocence throughout. By 1999 Simmons had filed numerous habeas corpus writs, but had not gained an evidentiary hearing by a Louisiana court. After receiving a copy of his evidence file in 1993, he had found that it contained exculpatory evidence that was not given to his court-appointed attorney by the District Attorney, and that there were inconsistencies in reports and statements of victims and witnesses.
In the United States penal system, upwards of 20 percent of state and federal prison inmates and 18 percent of local jail inmates are kept in solitary confinement or another form of restrictive housing at some point during their imprisonment. Solitary confinement (sometimes euphemistically called protective custody, punitive segregation (PSEG) or room restriction) generally comes in one of two forms: "disciplinary segregation," in which inmates are temporarily placed in solitary confinement as punishment for rule-breaking; and "administrative segregation," in which prisoners deemed to be a risk to the safety of other inmates, prison staff, or to themselves are placed in solitary confinement for extended periods of time, often months or years.
In the United States of America, prisoner law refers to litigation that determines the freedoms that a prisoner either holds or loses when they are incarcerated. This includes the end of the hands-off doctrine and the ability to be protected by the first, fourth, eighth, and fourteenth amendments. Furthermore, prisoner laws regulate the ways in which individuals experience privacy in a prison setting. Important case laws have arisen through time that have either hindered or protected prisoners from certain rights. Some include the Hudson v. Palmer case which held that prisoners were not protected against searches and seizures of their prison cells and Wolff v. McDonnell that stated that prisoners shall remain entitled to some of their constitutional rights even after being incarcerated.
Madison v. Alabama, 586 U.S. ___ (2019), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, barring cruel and unusual punishment. The case deals with whether the Eighth Amendment prohibits executing a person for a crime they do not remember.
Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U.S. ___ (2019), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding the standards for challenging methods of capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In a 5–4 decision, the Court held that when a convict sentenced to death challenges the State's method of execution due to claims of excessive pain, the convict must show that other alternative methods of execution exist and clearly demonstrate they would cause less pain than the state-determined one. The Court's opinion emphasized the precedential force of its prior decisions in Baze v. Rees and Glossip v. Gross.
Moore v. Texas, 137 S. Ct. 1039 (2017), is a United States Supreme Court decision about the death penalty and intellectual disability. The court held that contemporary clinical standards determine what an intellectual disability is, and held that even milder forms of intellectual disability may bar a person from being sentenced to death due to the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The case clarified two earlier cases, Atkins v. Virginia (2002) and Hall v. Florida (2014).
Sumner v. Shuman, 483 U.S. 66 (1987), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that a mandatory death penalty for a prison inmate who is convicted of murder while serving a life sentence without possibility of parole is unconstitutional. The decision in this case was a significant development in the Court's capital punishment jurisprudence, further clarifying the limits on the application of the death penalty in the United States.
