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Amdt8.2.2.2.1 Death Penalty: Early Doctrine

Eighth Amendment:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

In Trop v. Dulles, the majority refused to consider the death penalty as an index of the constitutional limit on punishment. Whatever the arguments may be against capital punishment . . . the death penalty has been employed throughout our history, and, in a day when it is still widely accepted, it cannot be said to violate the constitutional concept of cruelty.1 But a coalition of civil rights and civil liberties organizations mounted a campaign against the death penalty in the 1960s, and the Court eventually confronted the issues involved. The answers were not, it is fair to say, consistent.

A series of cases testing the means by which the death penalty was imposed2 culminated in what appeared to be a decisive rejection of the attack in McGautha v. California.3

The Court added a fourth major guideline in 2002, holding that the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury comprehends the right to have a jury make factual determinations on which a sentencing increase is based.4 This means that capital sentencing schemes are unconstitutional if judges are allowed to make factual findings as to the existence of aggravating circumstances that are prerequisites for imposition of a death sentence.

Footnotes

  1.  Jump to essay-1356 U.S. 86, 99 (1958).
  2.  Jump to essay-2In Rudolph v. Alabama, 375 U.S. 889 (1963), Justices Goldberg, Douglas, and Brennan, dissenting from a denial of certiorari, argued that the Court should have heard the case to consider whether the Constitution permitted the imposition of death on a convicted rapist who has neither taken nor endangered human life, and presented a line of argument questioning the general validity of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment. The Court addressed exclusion of death-scrupled jurors in Witherspoon v. Illinois, 391 U.S. 510 (1968). Witherspoon and subsequent cases explicating it are discussed under Sixth Amendment—Impartial Jury.
  3.  Jump to essay-3402 U.S. 183 (1971). McGautha was decided in the same opinion with Crampton v. Ohio. McGautha raised the question whether provision for imposition of the death penalty without legislative guidance to the sentencing authority in the form of standards violated the Due Process Clause; Crampton raised the question whether due process was violated when both the issue of guilt or innocence and the issue of whether to impose the death penalty were determined in a unitary proceeding. Justice Harlan for the Court held that standards were not required because, ultimately, it was impossible to define with any degree of specificity which defendant should live and which die; although bifurcated proceedings might be desirable, they were not required by due process.
  4.  Jump to essay-4Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002). See also Hurst v. Florida, 136 S. Ct. 616, 619–20 (2016).
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