In the past decade, there have been a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” as it applies to juvenile defendants.

Defendants who offer a diminished capacity defense cannot seek to exclude rebuttal evidence from court-ordered mental evaluations on Fifth Amendment grounds, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Kansas v. Cheever.

A 2010 law designed to eliminate harsher sentences for black offenders convicted of crack cocaine crimes should not apply retroactively, a federal appeals court ruled in a deeply divided decision that several dissenting judges wrote amounts to furthering racial discrimination.

Law enforcement officers for years have taken advantage of overly broad civil forfeiture laws.

The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment does not preclude a mandatory life sentence for dealers who possess a smaller quantity of crack cocaine than the quantity of powder cocaine necessary to trigger a similar sentence, the 7th Circuit has ruled.

11-3418 Miller v. Harbaugh

12-1806 Wheeler v. Wexford Health Sources, Inc.

In two widely anticipated rulings, the Supreme Court ruled the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment bars juvenile homicide offenders from being sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

A year after holding that sentencing a juvenile to life without parole in non-murder cases violates the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether imposing such a sentence on a juvenile for capital murder is unconstitutional.

At oral arguments on Tuesday, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court seemed skeptical of a federal prisoner’s claim that he should be allowed to bring a Bivens action against private contractors who run the prison where he was housed.

09-3280 Arnett v. Webster