In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of Supreme Court decisions and a new law sought to curb "frivolous" prisoner lawsuits and give more deference to prison officials. Together, they changed the legal ...

The prisoners write in carefully lettered script or on old electric typewriters. There are sometimes grammatical errors or misspellings. But the language is direct. They describe facing Stage 4 cancer ...

Oral argument before the Supreme Court this week showed why it is nonsense to claim that anti-vagrancy laws violate the Constitution‘s Eighth Amendment provision against “cruel and unusual punishment.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center released a film titled “The Eighth Amendment: Cruel and Unusual Punishment” on Annenberg Classroom in recognition of Constitution Day on Sept. 17. The 24-minute film ...

The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? Today on Throughline's We the ...

The Supreme Courts proportionality jurisprudence under the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause appears to be undergoing a kind of renaissance. Since 2002, the Court has held that the death penalty is ...

In a 6-to-3 decision that should have been slam-bang unanimous, the Supreme Court ruled today in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that a city does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and ...

So President Trump is so far unable to obtain a bond to guarantee payment of the $464 million civil fraud judgment against him. And of course, the trial judge Arthur Engoron has stipulated that ...