Worth your time to read, this law review article just published by the Virginia Law Review in a continuing discussion of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as it relates to "cruel and unusual" punishment and the death penalty — was the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause originally meant to prohibit excessive punishments as well as barbaric ones and that proportionality review is therefore unquestionably legitimate, as Florida’s Professor Stinneford suggests?

SEPARATING RETRIBUTION FROM PROPORTIONALITY: A RESPONSE TO STINNEFORD

by William T. Berry III, assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi where Professor Berry responds to an earlier article written by John F. Stinneford, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law, Gainesville, Florida:

Rethinking Proportionality Under the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, 97 Va. L. Rev. 899
(2011).

 

Berry argues that there are perhaps two weaknesses in Professor Stinneford’s arguments – see where you stand.