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The Eighth Amendment, The Death Penalty And Ordinary Robbery-Burglary Murderers: A California Case Study, Steven Shatz
The Eighth Amendment, The Death Penalty And Ordinary Robbery-Burglary Murderers: A California Case Study, Steven Shatz
Steven F. Shatz
Beginning with Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court's seminal case applying the Eighth Amendment to the death penalty, the Court has developed two principles limiting the states' power to define death-eligibility: the principle from Furman and Zant v. Stephens that states are required to "genuinely narrow" the death-eligible class to avoid the risk of arbitrariness in the imposition of the death penalty and the principle from Enmund v. Florida and Tison v. Arizona that the death penalty is a disproportionate punishment for a particular category of murders when it does not comport with contemporary values and serves no penological purpose. …