Source: https://constitutionproject.org/documents/interpreted-as-it-ought-to-be-toward-a-principled-eighth-amendment/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 01:47:26+00:00

Document:
John Bessler is an associate professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He is the author of Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment (Northeastern University Press, 2012) and The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution (Carolina Academic Press, 2014).
“Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said in 1852, “the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.” In his July 5th speech in Rochester, New York, to the town’s Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, Douglass addressed the meaning of the Fourth of July for slaves.
“There are,” Douglass recited, “seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment.” “[T]he conscience of the nation must be roused,” Douglass said, calling mid-nineteenth-century “shouts of liberty and equality” on July 4th mere “hypocrisy” amidst the “gross injustice and cruelty” of slavery.
Fast forward to 2014, more than 145 years after the 1868 ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which, at long last, following slavery’s abolition, guaranteed “equal protection of the laws.” On October 20th of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Chappell v. Ayala, a California death penalty case. In that case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that a death-row inmate, tried in 1989 for a triple murder in 1985, was denied a fair trial. During a three-month jury selection process, all black and Hispanic prospective jurors were struck using peremptory challenges. Counsel for the defendant, Mexican national Hector Ayala, argued that the strikes were on the basis of race, but the prosecution—and the trial judge—disagreed.
The questions in the U.S. Supreme Court appeal are narrow ones, focused on the application of the legal standard in Brecht v. Abrahamson and the proper interpretation of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. But the case, with its racial overtones, is a bleak reminder that the death penalty is still with us—and that minorities are frequently struck from jury panels in capital cases. Hector Ayala’s counsel dutifully brought Batson challenges, but they were repeatedly rejected by the district court, which inexplicably allowed the prosecution to offer private, ex parte explanations for its juror strikes.
Equally troubling, the “death-qualification” process—in use for decades, and permitted by the Supreme Court—continues, in case after case, to allow death penalty opponents to be struck from capital juries. This, it turns out, impacts a disproportionate number of minorities, women, and Catholics—groups that, along with Democrats and younger people, oppose executions in higher numbers. Because jury verdicts must be unanimous, death sentences are thus far more likely to be imposed if juries, before trial, are stripped of any death penalty opponents.
In early America, the Founding Fathers themselves questioned the need for executions for certain crimes, demonstrating ambivalence about the punishment of death. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—the first four U.S. Presidents—were all admirers of a now little-known book, On Crimes and Punishments. Written by an Italian criminal-law theorist, Cesare Beccaria, it was, tellingly, the first Enlightenment text to call for the death penalty’s abolition.
George Washington bought a copy of Beccaria’s book in 1769, just two years after the Italian version, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), was translated into English in 1767. In April 1777, during the midst of the Revolutionary War itself, then General Washington—the nation’s first commander-in-chief—told a subordinate “we should not introduce Capital executions too frequently.” Washington, seeking a scale of graduated punishments, asked Congress for more proportionate punishments, one of the central themes of Beccaria’s treatise.
John Adams—the second U.S. President—quoted Beccaria’s treatise at the Boston Massacre trial as he took on the unpopular task of representing British soldiers accused of murder. “I am for the prisoners at the bar,” Adams said in 1770 in open court, “and shall apologize for it only in the words of the Marquis Beccaria: ‘If by supporting the rights of mankind, and of invincible truth, I shall contribute to save from the agonies of death one unfortunate victim of tyranny, or ignorance, equally fatal, his blessings and tears of transport shall be sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of all mankind.’” John Quincy Adams, his son, later remarked on the “electrical effect” his father’s words had on spectators.
In 1807, Jefferson singled out On Crimes and Punishments as one of only a handful of books he recommended on the principles of government. And in the 1820s, in his autobiographical reflections, Jefferson wrote this: “Beccaria and other writers on crimes and punishments had satisfied the reasonable world of the unrightfulness and inefficacy of the punishment of crimes by death.” Plainly, Beccaria’s treatise—full of advice on everything from preventing crimes to the interpretation of the law—profoundly impressed the man from Monticello.
Not only is public support for executions down, but the number of executions is down too, moving from 98 in 1999 to 39 in 2013. Even though juries are still “death-qualified,” the number of U.S. death sentences also has dropped from more than 250 per year in 1997 and 1998 to fewer than 100 per year in 2011 and 2012. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released in June 2014 found that the majority of Americans actually prefer life without parole (52%) as the punishment for convicted murderers, with a smaller number (42%) wanting the death penalty. In short, when given a viable alternative, and not just asked an abstract question about the death penalty, people generally choose LWOP sentences instead of executions.
The declining support for capital punishment, in fact, has a lot to do with Americans’ embrace of life-without-parole as a sentencing option. While approximately 50,000 people in the U.S. are now serving LWOP sentences, the total number of death-row inmates is now just over 3,000. California, which hasn’t carried out an execution since January 2006, still has 745 death-row prisoners—the country’s largest death row but not a particularly active place for executions. Since 1978, California has executed a total of 13 inmates who, before their executions, languished on death row for an average of 17.5 years.
The dormancy of California’s death penalty is reflective of the ambivalence twenty-first century Americans feel about executions—an uneasiness that has only grown stronger since the days of the Founding Fathers. In November 2012, Californians, by a 52% to 48% margin, narrowly rejected Proposition 34, which would have abolished California’s death penalty and switched all the state’s 700-plus death sentences to LWOP sentences. Meanwhile, as Europeans have banned the export of lethal-injection drugs, legal battles have raged throughout America—including in California—over the legality of lethal-injection protocols, the primary method used to kill death-row inmates.
As for the U.S. Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, it is—truth be told—an irreconcilable mess. The touchstone of the Eighth Amendment is said to be “human dignity.” Yet year after year, the Supreme Court permits executions, many of which are botched and all of which corrode society’s moral compass as the government resorts to killing—the very thing the law so rightfully condemns. And death sentences and executions, as studies have shown, have become as arbitrary as ever, as freakishly imposed and inflicted as they were in 1972 when the Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia, once declared death penalty laws violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Executions are now heavily concentrated in one region, the South, and death sentences are largely meted out on the basis of geography or race or the poor quality of one’s counsel. Although death penalty statutes, unlike in Frederick Douglass’s time, are now neutral on their face, those who kill whites remain much more likely to get the death penalty than those who kill blacks. Statistics from the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center show that, of the persons executed for interracial murder in modern times, 31 inmates have been executed where the victim was black and the defendant was white. In contrast, 289 inmates—a far higher number—have been executed in circumstances where the victim was white and the defendant was black.
In reality, the Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment case law has become a kind of bizarre, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde jurisprudence. On the one hand, the Eighth Amendment protects prisoners from harm. Prison guards cannot gratuitously assault inmates without provocation, and Eighth Amendment precedents require that inmates be fed and clothed and be protected from the elements. In Hope v. Pelzer, the Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that it was an “obvious” Eighth Amendment violation for Alabama prison officials to handcuff an inmate to a hitching post and leave that shirtless inmate out in the sun, causing dehydration and a sunburn.
On the other hand, the Eighth Amendment—as currently interpreted by the nation’s highest court—allows inmates to be killed, a far worse fate than that dealt with in Hope v. Pelzer. In cases like Baze v. Rees, a 2008 case adjudicating the constitutionality of Kentucky’s three-drug protocol, the Court has ruled that, under the Eighth Amendment, it is permissible for inmates to be injected with lethal chemicals. After a brief period of no executions in the pre-Baze period, U.S. executions thus resumed after Baze, albeit sporadically and in only a limited number of states.
In effect, American death-row inmates under the prevailing Eighth Amendment regime are protected from harm up until the very moment of their executions. This Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde approach, giving the Eighth Amendment a split personality, makes no logical sense. And at some point, the Supreme Court will no doubt have to confront this fact—and its unprincipled reading of the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. Ironically, non-lethal corporal punishments such as ear cropping, the pillory and whipping—the latter closely associated with slavery—have already, for decades, been abandoned in the U.S. penal system.
In the twenty-first century, the U.S. Supreme Court continues to adhere to its lofty sounding “evolving standards of decency” test. Yet the central fact—and the major, and inexplicable, Eighth Amendment anomaly—remains: American executions continue while non-lethal bodily punishments, appropriately rejected over time, may no longer be used. Excluding large segments of the population from jury service in capital cases, whether on the basis of their political views or otherwise, is also incredibly strange—and appalling—because juries are supposed to serve as the conscience of the community.
For the Eighth Amendment to be read in a principled manner, as it should be, the death penalty needs to go. The death penalty can be abolished legislatively on a state-by-state basis, and abolition efforts will no doubt continue on that front. But as executions have become increasingly rare with the rise of LWOP sentences, the Supreme Court may soon be compelled to decide that executions have just become too freakish and arbitrary—in a word, too unusual—to be allowed any longer.
In the founders’ time, it must be remembered, death sentences were then a mandatory penalty and penitentiaries were still being designed and built. America’s first penitentiary—Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison—did not even open its doors until 1790, the year before the U.S. Bill of Rights was ratified. Now, however, death sentence are discretionary in nature, maximum-security prisons are common, and Americans have gravitated to life-without-parole sentences to protect the public from harm.
With the ready availability of penitentiaries, and with the rise of LWOP sentences, executions can no longer be considered necessary. Even with “death-qualified” juries, LWOP sentences for murderers have become the usual punishment, while death sentences have become truly unusual.
Criminals commit crimes, and heinous crimes such as murder reflect their callous disregard for life. Punishments, like the U.S. Constitution, though, should reflect our values and those of our society as a whole. Indeed, the U.S. Constitution itself should be interpreted in a manner that protects universal human rights, including human dignity and the right to be free from discrimination. Executions have long been considered cruel—Dr. Benjamin Rush believed them to be improper for all crimes, as he said at Benjamin Franklin’s house in March 1787—and they have, over time, become highly unusual, too.
Instead of asking whether executions violate the “evolving standards of decency,” perhaps the Supreme Court should just focus on interpreting the language in the Constitution itself. In the case of the Eighth Amendment, that means answering two basic questions: are executions cruel? And have they become unusual? The answer to both questions, fairly considered, is yes.
The Declaration of Independence, setting forth the American creed that Frederick Douglass, in another era, insisted Americans live up to, itself proclaims the “unalienable” right to life and “that all men are created equal.” In looking for a principled interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, one that no longer tolerates stripping minorities from juries or using barbaric punishments like the death penalty, a closer examination of the Constitution’s text—along with a reexamination of the Declaration of Independence and Cesare Beccaria’s writings—might be a good place to start.

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