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.
Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), was a landmark criminal case in which the United States Supreme Court invalidated all then existing legal constructions for the death penalty in the United States. It was a 5–4 decision, with each member of the majority writing a separate opinion. Following Furman, in order to reinstate the death penalty, states had to at least remove arbitrary and discriminatory effects in order to satisfy the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In the U.S. state of California, capital punishment is a legal penalty. However it is not allowed to be carried out as of March 2019, because executions were halted by an official moratorium ordered by Governor Gavin Newsom. Before the moratorium, executions had been frozen by a federal court order since 2006, and the litigation resulting in the court order has been on hold since the promulgation of the moratorium. Thus, there will be a court-ordered moratorium on executions after the termination of Newsom's moratorium if capital punishment remains a legal penalty in California by then.
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."
Capital punishment in India is a legal penalty for some crimes under the country's main substantive penal legislation, the Indian Penal Code, as well as other laws. Executions are carried out by hanging as the primary method of execution as given under Section 354(5) of the Criminal Code of Procedure, 1973 is "Hanging by the neck until dead", and is imposed only in the 'rarest of cases'.
Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), is a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held that it is unconstitutional to impose capital punishment for crimes committed while under the age of 18. The 5–4 decision overruled Stanford v. Kentucky, in which the court had upheld execution of offenders at or above age 16, and overturned statutes in 25 states.
Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6–3 that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments, but states can define who has an intellectual disability. At the time Atkins was decided, just 18 of the 38 death penalty states exempted mentally disabled offenders from the death penalty.
Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962), is the first landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution was interpreted to prohibit criminalization of particular acts or conduct, as contrasted with prohibiting the use of a particular form of punishment for a crime. In Robinson, the Court struck down a California law that criminalized being addicted to narcotics.
Marvin Lee Wilson was executed by the State of Texas on August 7, 2012, despite experts finding his IQ was 61. Supreme Court rulings subsequent to his execution in 2014 and 2017 ruled that the Eighth Amendment protected people with this low of an IQ from being executed under the discretion some states, including Texas, were using at the time. Texas successfully used crime allegation specifics to argue against the expert IQ, but the states are no longer allowed to do that. He entered death row on May 9, 1994, for the murder of a police drug informant who had caught him dealing cocaine. On November 10, 1992, Wilson abducted and shot 21-year-old Jerry Robert Williams following a physical confrontation between the two in the 1500 block of Verone in Beaumont. Wilson then left the body of Williams at a bus stop where it was later found by a bus driver. At the time of the murder, Wilson had two previous convictions for robbery, one of them aggravated.
Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815 (1988), was the first case since the moratorium on capital punishment was lifted in the United States in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of a minor on grounds of "cruel and unusual punishment." The holding in Thompson was expanded on by Roper v. Simmons (2005), where the Supreme Court extended the "evolving standards" rationale to those under 18 years old.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Cases of wrongful execution are cited as an argument by opponents of capital punishment, while proponents say that the argument of innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.
Johnny Paul Penry is a Texas prisoner serving three consecutive sentences of life imprisonment without parole for rape and murder. He was on death row between 1980 and 2008, and his case generated discussion about the appropriateness of the death penalty for offenders who are thought to be intellectually disabled.
Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court case that sanctioned the death penalty for mentally disabled offenders because the Court determined executing the mentally disabled was not "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment. However, because Texas law did not allow the jury to give adequate consideration as a mitigating factor to Johnny Paul Penry's intellectual disability at the sentencing phase of his murder trial, the Court remanded the case for further proceedings. Eventually, Penry was retried for capital murder, again sentenced to death, and again the Supreme Court ruled, in Penry v. Johnson, that the jury was not able to adequately consider Penry's intellectual disability as a mitigating factor at the sentencing phase of the trial. Ultimately, Penry was spared the death penalty because of the Supreme Court's ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, which, while not directly overruling the holding in "Penry I", did give considerable negative treatment to Penry on the basis that the Eighth Amendment allowed execution of mentally disabled people.
In the United States criminal justice system, a competency evaluation is an assessment of the ability of a defendant to understand and rationally participate in a court process.
Tennard v. Dretke, 542 U.S. 274 (2004), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court was asked whether evidence of the defendant's low IQ in a death penalty trial had been adequately presented to the jury for full consideration in the penalty phase of his trial. The Supreme Court held that not considering a defendant's low IQ would breach his Eighth Amendment rights and constitute a cruel and unusual punishment.
Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008), is a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which held that the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause prohibits the imposition of the death penalty for a crime in which the victim did not die and the victim's death was not intended.
James Lee Clark was an American murderer with an intellectual disability whose controversial execution by the state of Texas sparked international outcry. The controversy involved the argument that his execution violated the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Atkins v. Virginia (2002), which held that executions of intellectually disabled criminals is cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
Earl Washington Jr. is a former Virginia death-row inmate, who was fully exonerated of murder charges against him in 2000. He had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 for the 1982 rape and murder of Rebecca Lyn Williams in Culpeper, Virginia. Washington has an IQ estimated at 69, which classifies him as intellectually disabled. He was coerced into confessing to the crime when arrested on an unrelated charge a year later. He narrowly escaped being executed in 1985 and 1994.
Penry v. Johnson, 532 U.S. 782 (2001), is a United States Supreme Court case which concerned whether instructions given to a Texas jury were constitutionally adequate to emphasize the mitigating factors in sentencing of defendants who are intellectually disabled The Texas courts had determined the sentencing instructions were consistent with prior Supreme Court jurisprudence, but the Court in a divided decision reversed, finding the sentencing instructions insufficient. This was the second time Penry's case made it to the Supreme Court.
Hall v. Florida, 572 U.S. 701 (2014), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a bright-line IQ threshold requirement for determining whether someone has an intellectual disability is unconstitutional in deciding whether they are eligible for the death penalty.
