The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And how did the Constitution’s authors imagine it might change? Today on Throughline’s We the People: the Eighth Amendment, the death penalty, and what cruel and unusual really means.
John Bessler, law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Author of The Death Penalty’s Denial of Fundamental Human Rights.
Carol Steiker, law professor at Harvard Law School and author of Courting Death: the Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.
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