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Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Courts - "John Stinneford on the Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence"
From SCOTUSblog, this long entry by guest John Stinneford, summarizing his 80-page Virginia Law Review article. A sample:
The limited impact of the Supreme Court’s proportionality review is not the happy by-product of a criminal justice system that almost always imposes proportionate sentences. Rather, it is the result of the Court’s deliberate effort to limit proportionality review to a narrow range of cases, almost all of which involve the death penalty. In several recent cases, the Court has signaled a willingness to uphold virtually any sentence of imprisonment for virtually any felony offense without engaging in substantive proportionality review. For example, it upheld a sentence of twenty-five years to life for a recidivist who shoplifted three golf clubs and a sentence of fifty years to life for a recidivist who shoplifted videotapes on two occasions. In the wake of these decisions, lower courts have held that it is constitutional to impose a sentence of twenty-five years to life on a recidivist who commits a crime as minor as stealing a slice of pizza.A review of the Supreme Court’s proportionality jurisprudence suggests three problems with the Court’s approach that have caused it to limit proportionality review to a small class of cases.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 19, 2011 04:56 PM
Posted to Courts in general