The Court ruled that a capital defendant was not entitled to jury instructions on specific mitigating factors.
Atkins v. Virginia (2002)
Decision: The Court ruled that a state cannot execute a mentally retarded inmate. This decision overruled the Court’s 1989 decision in Penry v. Lynaugh.
Ring v. Arizona (2002)
Decision: The Court ruled that a jury, not a trial judge, should make the factual determinations necessary of the presence of aggravating factors in determining whether a defendant should receive a life in prison or death sentence. This decision overruled the Court’s 1990 decision in Walton v. Arizona.
Wiggins v. Smith (2003)
Decision: The Court ruled that a capital defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel was violated when his attorney failed to put forth any evidence of mitigating factors during his sentencing phase.
Roper v. Simmons (2005)
Decision: The Court ruled that a state cannot execute an inmate who committed his capital crime when he was a juvenile. The Court overruled its 1989 decision in Stanford v. Kentucky.
Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008)
Decision: The Court struck down a Louisiana statute that provided that child rapists could be executed.
What did the Court decide with respect to criminal three-strikes laws?
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld California’s Career Criminal Punishment Act (also known as the “three strikes” law) sentencing law in Ewing v. California (2003) and Lockyer v. Andrade (2003). Under the California law, if a criminal defendant is convicted of at least three felonies, he is subject to the three-strikes law which carries a penalty of 25 years to life.
The cases involved Gary Ewing who stole three golf clubs and Leandro Andrade, who stole $150 worth of videotapes. However, both defendants had multiple criminal convictions in their past, including burglaries, that made them eligible as recidivist offenders under the state law. They challenged their sentences and the three-strikes law as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause.
In Roper v. Simmons the Supreme Court ruled that inmates who committed their crimes while they were legally juveniles cannot be executed for said crimes (iStock).
The Court rejected the argument that the defendants’ sentences violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. “The gross disproportionality principle reserves a constitutional violation for only the extraordinary case,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the Court in Andrade. In her Ewing opinion, Justice O’Connor explained that states have the right to pass laws protecting the public from career criminals: “When the California Legislature enacted the three strikes law, it made a judgment that protecting the public safety requires incapacitating criminals who have already been convicted of at least one serious or violent crime. Nothing in the Eighth Amendment prohibits California from making that choice.” She also cited statistics showing that a disturbing number of inmates committed repeat offenses upon release from incarceration.
LegalSpeak: Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)
Justice Arthur Goldberg (concurring): “The Ninth Amendment reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Amendment is almost entirely the work of James Madison. It was introduced in Congress by him and passed the House and Senate with little or no debate and virtually no change in language. It was proffered to quiet expressed fears that a bill of specifically enumerated rights could not be sufficiently broad to cover all essential rights and that the specific mention of certain rights would be interpreted as a denial that others were protected…. The Ninth Amendment to the Constitution may be regarded by some as a recent discovery and may be forgotten by others, but since 1791 it has been a basic part of the Constitution which we are sworn to uphold. To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment and to give it no effect whatsoever.”
NINTH AND TENTH AMENDMENTS
What rights does the Ninth Amendment protect?
The Ninth Amendment provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” It means that there are other rights retained by the people even though they are not specifically listed, or enumerated, in the Bill of Rights.
One common objection to the Bill of Rights was that listing, or enumerating, certain rights in the Bill of Rights would mean that those were the only rights the people possessed. To answer this concern, James Madison adopted the Ninth Amendment which implies that people retain other rights not specifically listed in the Bill of Rights. For 175 years, the Ninth Amendment was, in the words of one Supreme Court Justice, a “constitutional curiosity.” However, in the 1965 case involving marital privacy, Griswold v. Connecticut (see LegalSpeak, p. 82), Justice Arthur Goldberg revived the amendment and said that it protected a right to privacy.
What is the Tenth Amendment?
The Tenth Amendment provides: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It is the only amendment in the Bill of Rights that does not focus solely on protecting an individual right. Rather it limits the power of the federal government vis-à-vis the state governments. It ensures that the federal government does not operate like a super-state government and supersede all state powers. In other words, the Tenth Amendment seeks to “reserve” some powers for the states and reaffirms the basic notion that the federal government is a government of enumerated (listed) powers, not unlimited powers.
Courts often refer to the concept of “dual sovereignty” when mentioning the Tenth Amendment, because it is a key provision in creating a federal system of government in which power is often shared between the federal and state governments.
Periodically, the news media, political pundits, and others refer to “states’ rights” usually as a claim that the federal government is encroaching upon the states’ domain. The constitutional hammer for those who advocate for states’ rights is the Tenth Amendment.
What type of law creates a Tenth Amendment issue?
Any time that the federal government passes a law or regulation that requires state or local government officials to administer a federal program, there is an argument that the Tenth Amendment comes into play. The U.S. Supreme Court explained the principle quite bluntly in New York v. United States
