The Pros And Cons Of Cruel And Unusual Punishment

What do you consider to be cruel and unusual punishment? Most people when asked this question think of medieval torture devices, burning people alive, and hard slave labor. However, cruel and unusual punishment, which is a protected against right by the eighth amendment, stretches far beyond these cliches and is still occurring in modern society. The case Miller v. Alabama and a parallel case, Jackson v. Hobbs deals with such punishments and brings up the questions of what, in current times, is to be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Miller v. Alabama addresses with the debate that arose surrounding the mandatory sentence of life without parole for a juvenile when two boys, fourteen-year-old Evan Miller and sixteen-year-old Colby Smith,

After being caught, Smith was offered the sentence of life with parole in exchange for testifying against and betraying Evan Miller, who was tried as an adult and was sentenced to mandatory life without parole. In the parallel case Jackson v. Hobbs, 14 year old Kentrell Jackson was sentenced to life without parole after an incident in which he was in the presence of a felony murder crime during a robbery. Jackson did not commit the murder, in fact he was outside the scene while it took place, yet he was still charged as an adult of felony murder. In both cases two young men with futures ahead of them had their chances of a life crushed because of a sentence meant for the worst criminals in the world. A mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole for juveniles is a direct violation of the eighth amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. In the precedent setting case Graham v. Florida the Supreme Court ruled that a sentence of life without punishment for non-homicidal juvenile offenders is a

For a juvenile to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole is almost to give that child the death penalty, a punishment that was outlawed in the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons. In Roper Christopher simmons challenged his death penalty sentence for murder at age 17 because of his claim that the was an “immature and irresponsible juvenile”. The Supreme Court overturned his sentence, saying that their was a national consensus against the death penalty for juveniles because so many states had rejected that as a viable form of punishment. A life without parole sentence is equal to the death penalty for a juvenile because the child is having any hope of living a semi-normal life terminated at a young age, in this case 14 years old. If this were your child would you want them to sit in jail for the rest of their life, with no hope and no reason to live? Or would you want them to, even if it was an impossibly long sentence, have a least some sliver of hope that maybe one day they will escape the icy hell of the prison walls and feel the sunshine upon their face once again? When the sentence of life with parole is given it is not a guarantee that the person will be let out, it is simply giving them some glimmer of hope and reason to