Today at the Supreme Court
By William Watkins • Monday May 17, 2010 4:29 PM PDT • 1 Comment
The Supreme Court decided an 8th Amendment case today, Graham v. Florida. The Court held that the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause does not permit a juvenile offender to be sentenced to life in prison without parole for a nonhomicide crime. While reasonable people can agree or disagree with the Court’s decision as a matter of policy, we should be concerned that the Court makes such calls rather than the people’s elected representatives.
I highly recommend Justice Thomas’s dissent. Here is a snippet:
The ultimate question in this case is not whether a life-without-parole sentence ‘fits’ the crime at issue here or the crimes of juvenile nonhomicide offenders more generally, but to whom the Constitution assigns that decision. The Florida Legislature has concluded that such sentences should be available for persons under 18 who commit certain crimes, and the trial judge in this case decided to impose that legislatively authorized sentence here. Because a life-without-parole prison sentence is not a “cruel and unusual” method of punishment under any standard, the Eighth Amendment gives this Court no authority to reject those judgments.
Tags: Constitution, Criminal Justice, Law 
I agree that where the Constitution uses subjective language, such as “cruel and unusual punishment,” it is up to the political branches of government to pass legislation that defines punishments based on their interpretations of what constitutes “cruel and unusual,” and not up to the courts to decide that for them. But I wonder how consistent you are in agreeing with that.
Another such phrase in the Constitution is “due process.” Thomas’s words here remind me of Roberts’s dissent in BOUMEDIENE v. BUSH:
“Today the Court strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants. The political branches crafted these procedures amidst an ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough debate. The Court rejects them today out of hand, without bothering to say what due process rights the detainees possess, without explaining how the statute fails to vindicate those rights, and before a single petitioner has even attempted to avail himself of the law’s operation. And to what effect? The majority merely replaces a review system designed by the people’s representatives with a set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date.”
Eric | May 18, 2010 | Reply