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Summary: Justice Breyer Insists Death Penalty

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Chapter 12 Article 2, Justice Breyer Insists Death Penalty Is Cruel, Even When Supreme Court Won’t
As stated throughout chapter twelve of the textbook, Constitutional Law and the Criminal Justice System by J. Scott Harr, Karen M. Hess, Christine Orthmann, and Jonathon Kingsbury, it states the rights of the United States, (U.S.) citizens under the eighth amendment. Pursuing this further, the eighth amendment was instituted into the U.S. Constitution, under the Bill of Rights, to insure that the U.S. Government could not enact excessive bail, unwarranted fines, or cruel and unusual punishment (Harr, Hess, Orthmann, & Kingsbury, 2015, p. 411). According to the textbook, there is actually no distant definition of what cruel and unusual punishment essentially is (Harr, Hess, Orthmann, & Kingsbury, 2015, p. 416). In fact, cruel and unusual punishment, according to the text is whatever society views it to be at a given time, as long as …show more content…

416-417). That being said, today most people might view cruel and unusual punishment as sentencing someone to death, however, isn’t the act of making someone sit and wait for years, knowing that he or she is scheduled to die, psychologically cruel? Moving on, as of 2016, in the state of California alone, there are currently 743 people on death row (Farias, 2016). According to Justice Stephen Breyer, the death penalty overall is unconstitutional, and as such, should be abolished in the state of California (Farias, 2016). In addition, Richard Delmer Boyer was charged and convicted for the robbery and the murder of an elderly couple (Farias, 2016). Boyer has now been on death row for 32 years (Farias, 2016). Pursuing this further, after over 22 years, Boyer petitioned the Supreme Court hoping that they would consider changing his sentencing (Farias, 2016). The fact that Boyer

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