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The U.S. Supreme Court has issued numerous rulings on the use of capital punishment (the death penalty). While some rulings applied very narrowly, perhaps to only one individual, other cases have had great influence over wide areas of procedure, eligible crimes, acceptable evidence and method of execution.
The Court has limited the death penalty to offenders who commit the "most serious crimes" and who are "the most deserving of execution" based on their culpability and blameworthiness. The Supreme Court has restricted death sentences by crime (see Coker v. Georgia and Enmund v. Florida) and class of offender (see Thompson v. Oklahoma, Ford v.
Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), was a landmark criminal case in which the United States Supreme Court decided that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
The defendants then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review their death sentence, asking the Court to go beyond Furman and declare once and for all the death penalty to be "cruel and unusual punishment" and thus in violation of the Constitution; the Court agreed to hear the cases.
The last time an inmate was put to death using any form of lethal gas was in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The Supreme Court in May last year rejected an earlier attempt ...
Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008), is a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which held that the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause prohibits the imposition of the death penalty for a crime in which the victim did not die and the victim's death was not intended.
Because only a few states continued to have child rape statutes that authorized the death penalty, the Court applied the "evolving standards of decency" review in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008) to expand Coker, ruling that the death penalty is unconstitutional for the rape of a child where there was no intention to kill the child.
The Supreme Court weighs whether inmate Richard Glossip's murder conviction should be thrown out — an unusual death penalty case in which the attorney general of Oklahoma has sided with a defendant.