The Flaws Of The Eighth Amendment
The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted. ” This amendment was created to prohibit the federal government from imposing harsh penalties on criminal defendants, either as price for obtaining pretrial release or as punishment for crimes after conviction. I do not believe that this amendment is being used for the right reasons and fairly for all Americans. If you ask me racial discrimination is the top card used for capital punishment. It has been used as a weapon to lock up and throw away the key mainly for colored people who commit a crime. What is excessive? And who determines what is excessive or cruel punishment? Who are we to play God? Who are we to decide what is lawful and unlawful? Where do we draw the line?
For a second before, I get into the good, the, the bad and the ugly of the Eighth Amendment, I would like to tell you some laws that make your head turn. In Kansas, it is illegal to hit a vending machine for stealing your money, in Alaska it’s illegal to get drunk in a bar. Who comes up with these laws? Now, I want to talk about Serious offenses and the silly deals in which they were given. According to the New York Times in 2016, a man named Brock Turner a college student at Stanford University got caught by passing people sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. Before being sentenced to only a mere six months in jail he wrote a letter to the judge stating “I am the sole proprietor of what happened on the night that changed these people’s lives forever. I would give anything to change what happened” his father then said his son's life had been ruined by 20 minutes of action. While this girl’s mind will forever be ruined due to what Brock did to her. Brock was faced up to 14 years but was only sentenced to three years probation atop a six-month jail sentence (he only served three) and register as a sex offender and personally I don’t think this sentence was even close to what he personally deserved.
Meanwhile also in 2016, an African American man Albert Wilson who was 20 years old met a girl 17 (white) at a bar in which she used a fake id to get into, left the bar with said men and said he raped her, meanwhile footage shows the man walking her home and then leaving five minutes later and the rape kit which had been done had not a single trace of his DNA and or semen. With evidence on his side showing that it never happened, Albert was sentenced to 12 years in prison, a lifetime of probation and a registry as a sex offender. Meanwhile Brock Turner who actually raped a girl got 3 months in jail with three years probation. While this innocent black man who was kind enough to make sure a girl got home safe is being accused of something he didn’t do.
I personally don’t believe in the Death Penalty because who are we to play god. However, I also think keeping them in jail for life for major crimes is excessive, but, but why on a life sentence do you only have to serve 25 years in order to try to apply for probation? In 2008, it ruled that capital punishment for child rape is unconstitutional. The opinion for the Court did not mention race or racial discrimination, even though, of the four hundred and fifty-five men executed for rape between 1930 and 1967, four hundred and five were black, and almost all had been convicted of raping white women.
What about protection for African Americans? Our young boys and men that are racially profiled and discriminated against in and out of the courts for being black? What about 14 year old Emmett was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman in 1955 in Money, Mississippi. Days later the white woman’s husband, and her brother forced Emmett to carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes.
The two men then beat him to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.
The United States constitution failed Emmett Till and less than two weeks after Emmett’s body was buried, Milam and Bryant went on trial in a segregated courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. There were few witnesses besides Mose Wright, who positively identified the defendants as Emmett’s killers. On September 23, the all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour before issuing a verdict of “not guilty,” explaining that they believed the state had failed to prove the identity of the body.
The eighth amendment somehow played a role in this case but, Milam and Bryant should have been given usual punishment, excessive fines and excessive prison time. Because Emmett was a African American in America the laws don’t officially apply, Milam and Bryant got off with a slap on the wrist. In 2017, Tim Tyson, author of the book The of Emmett Till, revealed in the book that Carolyn Bryant recanted her testimony, admitting over sixty years later that Till had never touched, threatened or harassed her. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” she said.
