Some proponents of the death penalty — including the late Justice Antonin Scalia and the 2016 Republican Party platform—have asserted that the Supreme Court cannot declare the death penalty unconstitutional because the Framers included reference to the punishment in the text of the Fifth Amendment. An article by Duke Law School Professor Joseph Blocher, published in the Northwestern University Law Review, critically analyzes that argument and concludes that the Fifth Amendment’s acknowledgment of the death penalty as an acceptable practice in the 1700s does not foreclose judicial review of the constitutionality of the practice under the Eighth Amendment or any other constitutional amendment. This, Blocher says, is because the Fifth Amendment contains restrictions on the exercise of government power, rather than affirmatively granting the government any constitutional power. The Fifth Amendment, Blocher writes, “contains three prohibitions on the use of capital punishment.” The Grand Jury Clause prohibits the government from bringing charges against a person “for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.” The Double Jeopardy Clause prohibits twice placing any person “in jeopardy of life or limb” for the same offense. The Due Process Clause prohibits depriving any person “of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” No one would argue that the mention of deprivation of limb in the Double Jeopardy Clause constitutionally legitimizes amputation as a criminal punishment. And by imposing constitutional limits on government conduct in attempting to take a defendant’s life, Blocher says “there is no reason to suppose that [the Fifth Amendment] somehow nullifies other constitutional prohibitions — most importantly, the ban on cruel and unusual punishment.” He notes that the Ninth Amendment reinforces this reading, “The Ninth Amendment indicates that the entire Bill of Rights — let alone any particular provision of it — cannot be read as an exclusive list. …Compliance with the Fifth Amendment does not provide the death penalty a safe harbor against constitutional challenges, including those derived from the Eighth Amendment.” Blocher concludes that to the extent reasons may exist not to abolish the death penalty, “the Fifth Amendment is not one of them.”
(J. Blocher, “The Death Penalty and the Fifth Amendment,” Northwestern University Law Review, 2016.) See U.S. Supreme Court and Law Reviews.
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