Explain justice stevens position on the death penalty and the 8th amendment.
|
On Wednesday, retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gave an interview at the annual conference of the 5th Judicial Circuit in Chicago, and explained his changed view on the death penalty. Show In 1976, Justice Stevens was among the majority opinion in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court decision that found the death penalty does not violate the Eighth or 14th Amendments, thereby reinstating it. But at Wednesday’s event, he explained his change of heart. The Washington Post reported:
USA Today reports:
Two years ago, while Justice Stevens voted with the majority allowing Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol to stand in Baze v. Rees, he wrote:
That “unacceptable number” that Justice Stevens refers to is 138: the number of men who have been exonerated from death row. What more evidence is needed that execution is indeed cruel and unusual punishment? The retired Supreme Court justice would like to add five words to the Eight Amendment and do away with capital punishment in America. It's a shame he didn't vote that way during his 35 years on the Supreme Court. By Andrew Cohen  April 7, 2014 Share In his latest book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, retired United States Supreme Court Justice John Stevens reminds us why some of the most frustrating judges are the ones who have left their courts behind. What would American law look like today, how different might it be, if this moderate justice had been willing to vote on the Court all those decades for what he now believes to be just? For example, a man who consistently upheld capital convictions and the death penalty itself for over 35 years, who helped send hundreds of men and women to their deaths by failing to hold state officials accountable for constitutional violations during capital trials, who more recently endorsed dubious lethal injection standards because he did not want to buck up against court precedent, now wants the Eighth Amendment to read this way, with five new words added:
It's never too late for redemption, I suppose (unless you are one of those innocent men executed in America since capital punishment returned in its modern form in 1976). And Justice Stevens deserves credit, at least, for sharing his change of heart with the rest of the world in a manner likely to garner much attention. In his new book, a wish-list of what he'd like to change about the Constitution, an apology of sorts for all that he got wrong, he writes:
These are powerful words—and perhaps they will further stoke the roiling debate today over the death penalty. But they are essentially the same words uttered famously, for essentially the same reasons, by another moderate Republican appointee, Justice Harry Blackmun. It's been 20 years now since he turned away from the death penalty in Callins v. Collins in one of the most famous dissents in Court history. In February 1994, Justice Blackmun wrote:
Twenty years later, with what we now know about wrongful convictions, racial disparities in capital cases, and lethal injection secrecy, those words ring ever more true. Now compare Justice Blackmun's cri de coeur with the words of Justice Stevens, in the aforementioned lethal injection case, Baze v. Rees, decided in 2008. In a concurrence in that case, after a lengthy critique of capital punishment rules and Kentucky's lethal injection plans, Justice Stevens wrote:
It took Justice Stevens over 30 years—from his ascension to the Supreme Court in 1975 to 2008—to reach this point. And it has taken him another six years, from 2008 to 2014, to fully become the advocate for reform that he never was on the Court. If I were Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, I would invite Justice Stevens today to testify on Capitol Hill about the death penalty—to bear witness, expert witness, to its arbitrary nature. I have written before about how continuing exposure to capital cases turns Supreme Court justices from supporters to opponents of the death penalty. About how no one on the Court who sifts through the litany of unfair capital trials bubbling up from state courts ever becomes a more ardent supporter of the death penalty. Justice Stevens is just the latest example of this frustrating phenomenon. These jurists see the light—almost always too late to do any good. Except it is not yet too late for Justice Stevens. In Six Amendments, he directly criticizes Justice Antonin Scalia's tendentious capital jurisprudence, and he should continue to do so as he now embarks upon his book tour. Freed from his obedience to Court precedent, and his self-imposed constraints as a judge, Justice Stevens should shout as loudly as his modest demeanor permits about the injustices he sees in the administration of the death penalty. It would be a good thing, maybe even a great thing, for a retired justice to speak so candidly in public about some of the most controversial issues the Court ever faces—who lives, who dies, and who decides. Who knows? Perhaps the justice's conscience, expressed so passionately now, will draw out from the shadows the views of those current justices who themselves have grave doubts about the constitutionality of capital punishment in America today. Better they say so while they still have a vote on the Court than to wait too long until they don't. What aspects of the death penalty are shaped by the 8th Amendment?Proportionality Requirement
In Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a penalty must be proportional to the crime; otherwise, the punishment violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Does the death penalty violate the 8th Amendment quizlet?answer: Yes. The Court's one-page per curiam opinion held that the imposition of the death penalty in these cases constituted cruel and unusual punishment and violated the Constitution.
Why is the 8th Amendment important?Eighth Amendment Protections Against Cruel Punishments, Excessive Bail, and Excessive Fines. The Eighth Amendment provides three essential protections for those accused of a crime, on top of those found in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments: It prohibits excessive bail and fines, as well as cruel and unusual punishments.
What caused the US Supreme Court to determine the death penalty to be unconstitutional in 1972?On June 29, 1972, the Supreme Court (5-4) decided Furman v. Georgia , finding that the application of the death penalty were unconstitutional because they violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
|
