Slate, 07/09/24: “Amid the torrent of far-right rulings this term, the U.S. Supreme Court maintained its practice of diluting if not outright ignoring Eighth Amendment rights against excessive criminal punishments.

Last month, the court sidestepped the Eighth Amendment’s ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ to criminalize homelessness, subjecting the most vulnerable Americans to fines they cannot pay and jail time that will only push them further from stable housing. It also left in place dozens of mandatory life-without-parole sentences imposed on youth in Arizona, despite a clear constitutional ban on precisely such extreme punishment for children.

This isn’t new. Over decades, the Supreme Court has gutted the Eighth Amendment’s protections against excessive punishment to the point that a life sentence for stealing a few hundred dollars gets rubber-stamped. With this hands-off approach, SCOTUS has helped turn the United States into the world leader in incarceration—more than 2 million people are held in our jails and prisons every day, including 200,000 confined for life—and earned the moniker, coined by law professor Rachel Barkow, ‘the court of mass incarceration.’

Like Justice Sonia Sotomayor, we remain ‘hopeful that someday in the near future, [the] Court will play its role in safeguarding constitutional liberties for the most vulnerable among us.’ But the court is not the only arbiter of constitutional rights. These same issues are also litigated in state supreme courts across the country, often under state constitutional provisions that are unique or far more expansive than their federal analogs. In these courts, even the role of history and ‘original meaning’ can be a wellspring of progressive values.”

Read the full article here.