Eighth Amendment | BRI’s Homework Help Series
How do we determine the punishment for those accused or convicted of a crime? What is the 8th amendment? Our latest Homework Help video explores this question and provides students with a succinct overview of the essential information regarding the 8th amendment.
0:00 How do we as a society determine the punishment for those accused or convicted of a crime? Thanks to the Eighth Amendment, to the Constitution, there are limits. It reads, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.”
0:21 But where does it come from? And what does it mean today? Let’s take a look at the Eighth Amendment. The origins of the Eighth Amendment go back to 17th century England when the English Bill of Rights
0:42 was created to limit the power of the monarchy. In theory, it prohibited excessive bail, cruel and unusual punishment, torture and jailing prisoners indefinitely. When the founders were establishing the New Republic, they wrote the Bill of Rights, a list of amendments to the Constitution
1:02 that protected the rights of individuals. The Eighth Amendment was designed specifically to safeguard the rights of those accused and convicted of crimes. And in recent decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has made many rulings relating to the Eighth Amendment. Its decisions have upheld the principle of federalism by generally
1:24 allowing states to determine which crimes require a large amount of bail, whether to refuse bail for those accused of serious crimes, and to set parameters on the reasonableness of criminal fines. But no part of the Eighth Amendment has proved more controversial than determining what is considered cruel and unusual punishment,
1:47 or more specifically, its application regarding the death penalty. In the 1972 case Furman v. Georgia The Supreme Court established that arbitrarily sentencing convicted criminals with the death penalty, specifically when racial bias was involved, violated the Eighth Amendment.
2:08 A few years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the court affirmed that when carefully and judiciously applied, the death penalty did not violate the Eighth Amendment, but it would later add parameters and stipulations for its use. For example, the government cannot impose it on minors or people with intellectual disabilities, and yet the death penalty remains
2:33 a controversial issue, raising questions related to morality, racial discrimination and its effectiveness in deterring crime. For its part, the government must continue to balance protecting public safety and the rule of law with individual rights of those convicted of crimes. How does the Eighth Amendment help support justice in a free society?
