8th Amendment Importance

The Constitution of the United States is the concrete platform that the nation is built upon which contains fundamental principles in which our nation is governed by. However, much of the Constitution is very ambiguous which leads to controversy in the court room. For example, the Eighth Amendment which states that “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted” (Baltzell). The first part of the Eighth Amendment protects accused citizens of the United States from unreasonable and extreme amounts of bail that would prevent them from being released from pretrial containment and it also limits the amount of a fine that can be given to a convicted person (8th Amendment)(Kurt). The

It all began with a guy named Titus Oates who claimed that the Catholics were plotting to kill King Charles II. This lead to the death of a multitude of Catholics. Later they figured out that he was lying the whole time in in order to try to get his father to have the thrown (8th Amendment). Oates was then convicted of perjury and sentenced to a life of imprisonment. Only three days out of each year was he allowed out of his cell, two days to be placed in the stocks and one day to be whipped (8th Amendment). A few short years later, Parliament created the Bill of Rights which prohibited “cruel and unusual punishment” (Stevenson). They descried Titus Oates punishment “as exorbitant, extravagant, barbarous, and inhuman,” therefore becoming the central key reason why the Eighth Amendment was created to put a stop to any more harsh chastisements similar to his (8th Amendment). It was placed into the English Bill of Rights which stated, “That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted,” which later was almost taken word for word and placed into the U.S. Bill of Rights (Levy). The U.S. Constitution reads today, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted” for the Eighth Amendment (Baltzell). Then exactly a century later, in 1789, the Constitution was on its way towards ratification

But are we in the future to be prevented from inflicting these punishments because they are cruel? If a more lenient mode of correcting vice and deterring others from the commission of it would be invented, it would be very prudent in the Legislature to adopt it; but until we have some security that this will be done, we ought not to be restrained from making necessary laws by any declaration of this kind’ “ (Bomboy). In other words, Livermore was arguing that all citizens who commit horrible crime do deserve severe punishments for the crimes that they commit, and until the government figures out a way to place restrictions and guidelines on the penalties that we believe are morally proper to give, then they cannot hold back from reprimanding those citizens. Consequently, The Founding Fathers created the Eighth Amendment to be intended for further generations to interpret the meaning of “cruel” and “unusual” over time (Donnell). The amendment was then ratified in 1791 nevertheless, the Eighth Amendment and the death penalty is still highly debated today because the differences in interpretations