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excessive sentences

State Constitutional Prohibitions against Unnecessary Rigor in Arrest and Confinement

(2025)

Clauses in five state constitutions prohibit treating people who are arrested or confined with “unnecessary rigor.” Decades ago, scholars concluded that history could teach us very little about these clauses. Now with the power of digitized records and text-recognition technology, this Article reveals that “unnecessary rigor” was a recognized phrase with deep...

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(Un)Constitutional Punishments: Eighth Amendment Silos, Penological Purposes, and People’s “Ruin”

The Yale Law Journal Forum (2020)

In 2019, all Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in Timbs v. Indiana that the Constitution’s prohibition on excessive fines applied to the states. The Court’s opinion discussed the Excessive Fines Clause’s “venerable lineage” and termed its protections “fundamental.” Justice Thomas, concurring, wrote that the English prohibition against excessive fines aimed...

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