Music Wow! Welcome to Hibiscus history, guys. I'm Dizzy and I'm Dizzy for the Constitution because we're doing the Constitution for Dummy series, banging out the 8th Amendment. I think words are really important and if you're going to engage in political debate, if you're going to have an opinion, everyone's got an opinion, let's base it on the words of the Constitution and not your feelings. Although I do think your feelings count. So get it up for the learning. We're about to drop it on you like a sack of potatoes. Bang! Alright, let's look at the words, guys. Accessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted. Now, before we break up those words, I think it's important that we all understand that the 8th Amendment has been selectively incorporated and of course you've learned this in previous lectures that selective incorporation is when the Supreme Court is going to take the 14th Amendment with its prohibition on the states of violating its due process or equal protection of its citizens and it's going to apply some of the bill of rights to the states. So for instance, we all understand that the First Amendment has a protection of religion, the free exercise of religion. So if Alabama has the law saying you couldn't pray to the fairy room goddess, that would be in violation of the First Amendment, but only using the 14th Amendment's equal protection due process clause to apply that First Amendment. So the 8th Amendment has been selectively incorporated, meaning that we have rules about the 8th Amendment that apply to the states. Now, where does the 8th Amendment come from? Well, if you go to Great Britain and English history, you're really looking at the English bill of rights, which has pretty much the exact same language and that found its way into the bill of rights because we so much want to protect our basic human dignity against the tyranny and the power of the states when it comes to punishing people for crimes. So let's look at some different parts of the 8th Amendment. Excessive bail shall not be required. Bail, of course, is what's what he puts up as a defendant, money-wise, in order to guarantee that they are going to come back to trial. So the concept is that you really can't use bail to be punitive, to punish the crime. You're just using it to guarantee the person comes back. So excessive has been basically said to have to be reasonably calculated, and it has to be used in light of the perceived evil. So reasonably calculated would probably go to the idea that if I work on Wall Street and I'm stealing money from the firm, maybe my bail is going to be a million dollars because I work on Wall Street. If I am homeless and I rob a 7-11, you know, the cash register 50 bucks, I probably I'm not going to get a million dollar bail because I'm never going to be able to come up with it. So it needs to be calculated reasonably depending on, you know, the circumstances and also on the perceived evil. So if I chop up a thousand people into little body parts and spread them all over the city, my bail might be a million dollars. Probably should be a million dollars. As opposed to if I, you know, steal a twinkie, my bail obviously can't be the same. The perceived evil. Excessive fines. Excessive fines has been clarified and defined by the court by saying that you can't have excessive fines without due process. That you can have high fines, but there has to be due process. So if a jury awards somebody with a disease living next to a power plant a million dollars, that might seem like it's excessive, but excessive is really in the eye of the beholder and you've had due process as the corporation. You've had a jury trial. Now if we pass a law and we find you a million dollars a day for polluting too much, that's probably excessive because you as a corporation have not had a chance to respond. There's no due process. Now cruel and unusual punishment inflicted. That's where you're really going to get into the debates about the death penalty and torture and those types of things. First I would say that this has been defined in terms of what violates cruel and unusual. It's end by the way, not or. So you can be cruel, but you can't be cruel and unusual. You can be unusual, but you can't be unusual and cruel. And one of the most famous court decisions in 1972, Ferman versus Georgia, the Supreme Court came up with basically a test to find out if something was violating the cruel and unusual language of the Eighth Amendment. Number one, they said that the punishment can be degrading. It can't be torture. It can't be used just to totally humiliate you. Number two, it can't be arbitrary. It can't be kind of like in the eye of the beholder. It has to be really clear that this is the punishment. Arbitschari means that you're kind of, you know, winging it. And number three, it has to be totally rejected by society or if it's unnecessary punishment, if it's just being done not for justice reasons. So using that test in 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty violated that. And everybody that was on death row got off their death row, was converted to life sentences like Charles Manson. He was given the death penalty for those murders, the Sharon Tate murders, but he's still alive. That's because of the 72 Ferman decision. And then the court reapplied the test to the death penalty in 1976, Greg versus Georgia, and they reversed themselves. But you still have that test. So if a state passes a, I don't know, a punishment law where they're going to hang people upside down on crosses on Main Street, that test would say that that would be unconstitutional. There's some other selectively incorporated rules. We don't execute minors in this country. We do not execute the mentally handicapped in this country. But other than that, it's really up to the states to kind of decide for themselves if they want to have the death penalty. You can have that debate down in the comments below. The only other case that's really applicable here, and I have a problem saying the word apopacal, but is harlamin versus michigan, which was a court case that tested whether or not sending somebody to life for prison for a drug offense, violated kind of the cruel and unusual punishment language. And the court basically said that it did not. So if you have a state law like three strikes in your out, and then your third strike is you robbed a seven eleven, and now you're going to get life imprisonment. That might seem excessive. It might seem cruel and unusual for the crime, but the courts have decided that that's not. That the states can decide for themselves whether they want those laws. I talked too much, but you're growing your brain, aren't you? All right, you can check right here. Actually, if you click the monkey, the monkey will take you to the playlist for the Constitution for Duncan series. And I'll tell you what, if you click Benjamin Franklin right there, you can subscribe to hip-puse history. How much fun would that pay? I mean, really, think about clicking Benjamin Franklin would be so much fun. I know that you're doing it right now because you can't hold yourselves back. All right, that's kind of tick-eye. Make sure you check the description. We have lots of other EDU channels that you should be checking out, and thank you for tuning in. Remember where attention goes, energy flows, and I think I've got to see you later.