Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/23-175_19m2.pdf
Page Number: 24.0

Cite as:  603 U. S. ____ (2024) 

19 

Opinion of the Court 

That framing may have made some sense.  Our due pro-
cess jurisprudence has long taken guidance from the “set-
tled usage[s] . . . in England and in this country.”  Hurtado 
v. California, 110 U. S. 516, 528 (1884); see also Kahler, 589 
U. S., at 279.  And, historically, crimes in England and this
country  have  usually  required  proof  of  some  act  (or  actus 
reus) undertaken with some measure of volition (mens rea).
At  common  law,  “a  complete  crime”  generally  required
“both a will and an act.”  4 Blackstone 21.  This view “took 
deep and early root in American soil” where, to this day, a 
crime  ordinarily  arises  “only  from  concurrence  of  an  evil-
meaning  mind  with  an  evil-doing  hand.”    Morissette  v. 
United  States,  342  U. S.  246,  251–252  (1952).    Measured 
against these standards, California’s law was an anomaly,
as it required proof of neither of those things.

Mr.  Robinson’s  resort  to  the  Eighth  Amendment  was
comparatively brief.  He referenced it only in passing, and 
only for the proposition that forcing a drug addict like him-
self  to  go  “ ‘cold  turkey’ ”  in  a  jail  cell  after  conviction  en-
tailed  such  “intense  mental  and  physical  torment”  that  it
was akin to “the burning of witches at the stake.”  Robinson 
Brief 30.  The State responded to that argument with barely
a paragraph of analysis, Brief for Appellee in Robinson v. 
California,  O. T.  1961,  No.  61–554,  pp. 22–23,  and  it  re-
ceived virtually no attention at oral argument.  By almost
every indication, then, Robinson was set to be a case about 
the scope of the Due Process Clause, or perhaps an Eighth 
Amendment case about whether forcing an addict to with-
draw from drugs after conviction qualified as cruel and un-
usual punishment. 

Of course, the case turned out differently.  Bypassing Mr.
Robinson’s  primary  Due  Process  Clause  argument,  the 
Court charted its own course, reading the Cruel and Unu-
sual Punishments Clause to impose a limit not just on what 
punishments may follow a criminal conviction but what a