was ratified (Hall 208).
In 1910, the Supreme Court invalidated a territorial statute derived from Spanish law that imposed cadena temporal, meaning twelve to twenty years chained in prison, for knowingly entering a false statement in the public record (Weems v. United States). The penalty was seen as excessive and disproportionate to the crime, but the Court based this on a narrow historic reading of the Eighth Amendment without any clear indication of the criteria by which the ruling was developed. The death penalty for rape was held to be cruel and unusual in 1977 (Coker v. Georgia) and similarly for kidnaping that same year (Eberheart v. Georgia), in both cases because it was seen as "grossly disproportionate to the offense." The Court ruled in 1958 that expatriation was also cruel and unusual because it was a denial of the defendant's right to have rights (Trop v. Dulles). The first time the Court applied the clause to invalidate a state law was when it struck down imprisonment for the status offense of narcotics addiction (Robinson v. California, 1962)(Hall 209).
As noted, the issue has been raised in death penalty cases, though the Supreme Court has determined that the death penalty as such is neither cruel nor unusual. When the death penalty was eliminated for a time by a Supreme Court decision in 1972 (Furman v. Georgia), it was because of the way capital punishment laws were written rather than because the Court saw anything cruel or unusual in capital punishment itself (Hall 125). Justice Brennan believed that capital punishment was cruel and unusual, and he hoped that this idea would prevail. Only one other Justice has ever agreed on this point, and that was Thurgood Marshall. The Court rejected the death penalty in 1972 because it was applied in a "wanton and freakish manner." Brennan concurred but went further, holding that it was also cruel and unusual in its infliction of acute pain and suffering:
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