The Eighth Amendment
The Eighth Amendment circa 1789...
The Eighth Amendment circa 2019...
The Eighth Amendment states “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
To learn more, check out Cornell’s Legal Information Institute annotation of the Eighth Amendment.
The Eighth Amendment continues to raise questions concerning punishment for juveniles and for those with mental or developmental disorders. As recently as 2019, in the Supreme Court case Kahler v. Kansas, Kahler was sentenced to death for murdering his wife, daughters, and his wife's grandmother. Even though experts testified that Kahler exhibited major depressive disorder, as well as obsessive-compulsive, borderline, paranoid, and narcissistic personality tendencies, Kansas law prohibited the jury from considering a mental disorder as a defense. Kahler appealed his sentence as violating his Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court determined that a state may abolish the "insanity defense" without violating the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Further explore Kahler v. Kansas through the Oyez page regarding the case.