Cruel and Unusual Punishment : Throughline : NPR

Alexander Aksakov / Getty Images

Alexander Aksakov / Getty Images

The eighth amendment. What is a cruel and unusual punishment? Who can define and decide its limits? And how could the authors of the Constitution imagined that it could change? Today on the line We people: The eighth amendment, the death penalty and what cruel and unusual means. This episode was initially published in January 2025.

Guests
John Bessler, Professor of law at the school of law at the University of Baltimore and auxiliary professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Author of The refusal of fundamental human rights death penalty.

Carol SteierProfessor of law at the Harvard Law School and author of Courting Death: the Supreme Court and the capital punishment.

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