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8th Amendment Importance

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The Eighth Amendment It’s a late Autumn afternoon and a young fourteen year old boy is told that he has to pay $24,000 bail for stealing a bag of groceries. This is an unreasonable price to pay for the crime he committed. Luckily for us, the Eighth Amendment protects US citizens from unfair situations such as this one. The Eighth Amendment’s meaning and purpose has left an enduring impact on the citizens of the United States of America.
Meaning and Purpose First of all, the Eighth Amendment is an extremely significant part of the Constitution. The Eighth Amendment’s purpose is split into two parts. The first way that the Eighth Amendment is important to the Constitution is that it protects us from high bail prices. According to http://www.annenbergclassroom.org, …show more content…

Supreme Court reviewed the cases of Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson who were both convicted with committing capital murder at the age of fourteen. Firstly, all defendants are allowed to argue that their punishment violated the Eighth Amendment. According to www.verdict.justia.com, “ On a theory that Miller and Jackson were entitled to individualized sentencing, they were denied the opportunity to argue the relevance of these mitigating factors to their proper punishment in an attempt to persuade their judges that the sentence of LWOP was too harsh.” Specifically, this indicates that the accused people were not allowed to argue that their punishment had violated the Eighth Amendment. Secondly, age matters when deciding the consequence for the convicted criminals. For instance, the article claimed, “The first argument is that no fourteen-year-old may be sentenced to LWOP, given a fourteen-year-old’s biologically diminished capacity.” In particular, this means that minors cannot be sentenced to a life in prison. Another example is when the article proclaimed,” The second argument against the sentences in these cases is that even if the Supreme Court concludes that LWOP is sometimes a permissible sentence for a fourteen-year-old homicide offender, the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments demands that the sentencing judge at least have the opportunity to take the age of the offender into account in

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