A federal circuit judge wants the Supreme Court to scrap a longstanding test for determining what is cruel and unusual punishment. In an October speech to the Federalist Society, Reuters reported, Judge Thomas Hardiman, appointed by President George W. Bush to the Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, advocated a "return to the text and original meaning of the Eighth Amendment" and an end to the "evolving standards of decency" test created by the Supreme Court in the 1950s.
In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that stripping someone's citizenship for committing a crime violated the Eighth Amendment. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that, to determine what constitutes cruel or unusual, the Court "must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." That test has since been used by liberal Supreme Court majorities to strike down death penalty protocols, ban capital sentences for crimes that did not result in death, and outlaw death sentences for offenses committed as a minor.
