Reference no: EM133673777

Question 

Make academic, improve it: Some people rejoice over shaming penalties. Bringing unfavorable publicity to criminal activity certainly seems warranted. And encouraging criminals to feel bad for their exploits makes perfect sense. At the same time, though, shaming penalties have been attacked on a number of grounds. The most obvious critique is that such penalties violate the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But this criticism may not carry much weight. To understand why this is so, it is worth quickly considering the Supreme Court's definition of cruel and unusual punishment. To date the U.S. Supreme Court has not decided on the constitutionality of shaming punishments. It has, however, had occasion to decide whether corporal punishment (i.e., the infliction of physical pain on a convicted criminal) violates the Eighth Amendment. In Trop v. Dulles, the Court stated that the meaning of the Eighth Amendment must be drawn from "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."56 This would seem to suggest that assuming the United States is a maturing society, corporal punishment would not be allowed, but the Supreme Court has never found that such punishments rise to the level of cruel and unusual.