John D. Bessler, University of Baltimore School of Law, has poste

 

The U.S. Supreme Court and legal scholars have long traced the origins of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishments" to the English Declaration of Rights, codified as the English Bill of Rights (1689). The English Declaration of Rights recited that, in King James II's reign, "illegal and cruel punishments" had been "inflicted," with its tenth clause then declaring in hortatory fashion: "That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." The prohibitions against excessive bail and excessive fines and the final phrase-"nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted"-were later incorporated into the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), various state constitutions, and the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment. One legal scholar, Anthony Granucci, once described the wording of the English bar on "cruel and unusual punishments" as the product of "chance and sloppy draftsmanship," concluding that American lawmakers, in adopting the Eighth Amendment, misinterpreted "the intent of the drafters of the English Bill of Rights." The Eighth Amendment famously reads: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

The U.S. Supreme Court and Eighth Amendment scholars have misidentified the English Declaration of Rights as the first appearance of the "cruel and unusual punishments" language, with Justice Thurgood Marshall, relying on Granucci's Eighth Amendment scholarship, observing that the use of "unusual" in the English Declaration of Rights "appears to be inadvertent." This Article demonstrates that the conventional account of the origins of the "cruel and unusual punishments" phraseology-spelled "cruell and unusuall punishments" in some early English sources-is woefully incomplete. The standard account of how that terminology first emerged during the Revolution of 1688-1689, popularly known as the "Glorious Revolution," fails to consider long-forgotten, far earlier uses of the cruel and unusual punishments terminology. Those usages stretch back as far as the early 1600s, during the reign of King James I, though they initially appear in non-legal contexts (i.e., in a history of Venice translated from French into English and published in 1612; in English courtier and poet George Wither's satire, Abuses Stript, and Whipt, first published in the early 1610s; and in 1642 Irish Catholic Remonstrances from Ulster following an Irish rising in 1641). Because of the terminology's prior appearances in those places, the use of the cruel and unusual punishments phraseology in the English Declaration of Rights was almost certainly neither inadvertent nor the product of sloppy drafting.