Constitutional Protections in American Criminal Essay

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Georgia (428 U.S. 153). In that case, the Supreme Court finally ruled specifically that capital punishment was not inherently necessarily cruel or unusual, and therefore, was not a violation of the Eighth Amendment in and of itself (Schmalleger, 2008).

Since Gregg, the issues surrounding the Eighth Amendment constitutionality of capital punishment relate to the specific methods of implementation in light of evidence that lethal injection, the most common method used by states, may violate the prohibition against cruelty by virtue of the frequency of mistakes that prolong suffering unnecessarily (Schmalleger, 2008; Zalman, 2008). In addition to Eighth Amendment issues, capital punishment also raises equal protection issues in connection with suggestions of differential application with respect to minority defendants and those who are economically disadvantaged (Dershowitz, 2002).

Personal Opinion:

In many ways, the extensive constitutional protections afforded by the Bill of Rights interfere with efficient law enforcement efforts by the state.

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This is particularly evident when obvious evidence of guilt is excluded from trial by rule, resulting in the acquittal of criminal defendants who would certainly have been convicted but for police or prosecutorial misconduct. However, the alternative to a system that emphasizes conviction of guilty defendants over the exoneration of those wrongfully accused is too high a price to pay for more efficient criminal prosecution. Ultimately, the criminal justice system must err on one side or the other. The experience under British rule strongly motivated the Founding Fathers to err on the side of the rights of the innocent instead of the need to punish the guilty. Modern criminal law continually adapts to contemporary society to serve both interests as fully as possible, but the magnitude of the importance of avoiding false convictions always outweighs the importance of securing criminal convictions......

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