NCJ Number
162118
Journal
Criminal Law Bulletin Volume: 32 Issue: 3 Dated: (May-June 1996) Pages: 211-243
Date Published
1996
Length
33 pages
Annotation
This article analyzes the extent to which the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment can serve as a limitation on intrusive forms of mental health treatment and correctional rehabilitation.
Abstract
The Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments serves as an independent constitutional limitation on unwanted mental health and correctional treatment that is intrusive and degrading to human dignity. Involuntary treatment that has as its motive the punishment of the offender is alien to the American constitutional heritage. In the American tradition, treatment is a consensual process. In the contexts in which the courts have upheld involuntary treatment, although such treatment was imposed to achieve an overriding public purpose, it was also therapeutically appropriate for the individual. Medical experimentation that is not therapeutically appropriate for the research subject must be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Treatment imposed on death row inmates to restore their competence for the sole purpose of executing them is a violation of the Eighth Amendment. Evolving principles of customary international law to which the United States subscribes condemn nonconsensual human experimentation and involuntary mind control. Treatment as punishment would also violate basic principles of medical ethics. Our evolved standards of decency and human dignity thus would be offended by the imposition of intrusive forms of treatment administered not as therapy, but as punishment. Medical punishment is repugnant to fundamental human values and our conception of the individual, and thus should be condemned under the Eighth Amendment. 195 footnotes