Batt’s Rights Under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, Essay Example

Expectations from the framers of the First Congress certainly changed over the years as inspired by the infamous case Trop v Dulles when it was distinguished that ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ meant anything that would offend society’s ‘evolving sense of decency over time.’ Francis v Resweber considered whether a state could electrocute a man twice when the first surge of electric energy did not electrocute the man. It was decided by a 5-4 vote that the man could be shocked again because it should not be decided by the mental anguish the prisoner felt in the past. The dissenters in the judgment felt that it would be cruel to shock the prisoner a second time, though. In Ingraham v White it was decided that corporal punishment in Florida schools did not fit the bill for violations against the Eighth Amendment because corporal punishments in schools were not violations of criminal justice.

Justices Scalia and Rehnquist argued the Eighth Amendment certainly did not address the proportionality of punishments in context in the least bit at all. Hudson v McMillan [1992] where a prison inmate was nearly beat to death in Louisiana prison by prison guards found the guards in violation of the 8^th Amendment. This was found because these sentences were judicially imposed and not because of the minimal nature of the beatings. Roper v Simmons [2005] had a decision to make whether it was cruel and unusual punishment to execute a man for a crime he committed when he was a minor. Voting 5-4 and citing ‘standards of decency’ the courts voted not to execute the man based on the premise he was under the age of 16 at the  time the crime was committed and previously children under the age of 16 who had committed crimes, the court had found it unconstitutional to execute them in the past.

References

Trop v Dulles 356 U.S. 86 (1958)

Frances v Resweber 329 U.S. 459 (1947)

Ingrahm v White 430 U.S. 651 (1977)

Hudson v McMillan 503 U.S. 1 (1992)

Roper v Simmons (03-633) 543 U.S. 551 (2005) 112 S. W. 3d 397