e Supreme Court conceded that torture and punitive "atrocities"--such as burning at the stake, crucifixion, or breaking on the wheel--would be defined as cruel and unusual, as in Wilkerson v. Utah in 1879. Other forms of punishment that were actually authorized by the state--such as hanging, shooting, and electrocution--were not, as seen in In re Kemmler in 1890. Hall writes,
The Court's criterion seems to have been whether a punishment would have been considered cruel and unusual in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified.
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). 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).
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. W
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