The Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

een applied to the states. On February 20, 2019, the Supreme Court ruled
unanimously in Timbs v. Indiana that the Excessive Fines Clause also applies to the
states.
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Background
“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed,
nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
The Eighth Amendment was adopted, as part of the Bill of Rights, in 1791. It is almost
identical to a provision in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, in which Parliament
declared, "as their ancestors in like cases have usually done...that excessive bail ought
not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments
inflicted."
The provision was largely inspired by the case in England of Titus Oates who, after the
ascension of King James II in 1685, was tried for multiple acts of perjury that had led to
executions of many people Oates had wrongly accused. Oates was sentenced to
imprisonment, including an annual ordeal of being taken out for two days pillory plus
one day of whipping while tied to a moving cart. The Oates case eventually became a
topic of the U.S. Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. The punishment of
Oates involved ordinary penalties collectively imposed in a barbaric, excessive and
bizarre manner. The reason why the judges in Oates' perjury case were not allowed to
impose the death penalty (unlike in the cases of those whom Oates had falsely
accused) may be because such a punishment would have deterred even honest
witnesses from testifying in later cases.
England's declaration against "cruel and unusual punishments" was approved by
Parliament in February 1689, and was read to King William III and his wife Queen Mary
II on the following day. Members of Parliament then explained in August 1689 that "the
Commons had a particular regard…when that Declaration was first made" to
punishments like the one that had been inflicted by the King's Bench against Titus
Oates. Parliament then enacted the English Bill of Rights into law in December 1689.
Members of parliament characterized the punishment in the Oates case as not just
"barbarous" and "inhuman" but also "extravagant" and "exorbitant".
There is some scholarly dispute about whom the clause intended to limit. In England,
the "cruel and unusual punishments" clause may have been a limitation on the
discretion of judges, requiring them to adhere to precedent. According to the great
treatise of the 1760s by William Blackstone entitled Commentaries on the Laws of
England:
[H]owever unlimited the power of the court may seem, it is far from being wholly
arbitrary; but its discretion is regulated by law. For the bill of rights has particularly
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