Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
The Eighth Amendment deals only with criminal punishment, and has no application to civil processes. In holding the Amendment inapplicable to the infliction of corporal punishment upon schoolchildren for disciplinary purposes, the Court in Ingraham v. Wright explained that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause “circumscribes the criminal process in three ways: First, it limits the kinds of punishment that government can impose on those convicted of crimes; second, it proscribes punishment grossly disproportionate to the severity of the crime; and third, it imposes substantive limits on what can be made criminal and punished as such.” 1 These limitations, the Court thought, should not be extended outside the criminal process.2
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Footnotes
- 1
- Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651, 667 (1977) (citations omitted). Constitutional restraint on school discipline, the Court ruled, is to be found in the Due Process Clause, if at all.
- 2
- Id. at 667–69.