.
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 kidnapping 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)
...