Abstract
Consider now the phrase used in the Eighth Amendment itself. It prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, not cruel or unusual punishment. Therefore, a punishment must be cruel and unusual to be unconstitutional. The framers meant to outlaw unusual punishment, if cruel. But not cruel punishment, if usual. A punishment has to be new (unusual) as well as cruel to be unconstitutional. The death penalty hardly qualifies on that score. For whether cruel or not, the death penalty is not “unusual” in this Eighth Amendment sense.* (There is another sense, of which anon.)
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Notes
Trop v. Dulles (1957), 356 U.S. 86.
Pugh v. Locke,406 F. Supp. 318; see also Newman v. Alabama (1976), 559 F. Supp. 2d. Certiorari denied, 98 U.S. 3057.
Parigiano v. Garrihy (1976), 443 F. Supp. 956.
Ramos v. Lamn (1979), 485 F. Supp. 122. Affirmed in part and remanded in part, 10th Circuit Court of Appeals (1980), 639 F. Supp. 2d. Certiorari denied, 101 U.S. 1259.
Ruiz v. Estelle (1981), 503 F. Supp. 1265. Execution stayed, 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, 650 F. Supp. 2d, 555.
Weems v. U.S.,217 U.S. 349.
Virgina Woolf, The Common Reader ( New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925 ), p. 83.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, trans. Phillips Bradley (New York: Knopf, 1945 ), pp. 165–166.
I include the Argentine military in the same select class as the KGB of the Soviet Union and the present regime in South Africa on the authority of Jacobo Timerman, who survived their maltreatment. See his Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number ( New York: Knopf, 1982 ).
For a Texan’s account of the vagaries of Texan statutory draftsmanship, see Charles L. Black, Jr., Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake, 2nd ed., augmented (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1981 ), pp. 114–121.
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© 1983 Ernest van den Haag and John P. Conrad
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van den Haag, E., Conrad, J.P. (1983). Discrimination and Justice. In: The Death Penalty. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2787-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2787-3_10
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