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Graham crackers: reflecting on Eighth Amendment rules versus standard and subconstitutional echoes

By Douglas A. Berman

Having now had a chance to read and reflect on all the opinions in Graham, I have created a new topical archive entitled "Assessing Graham and its aftermath."  Because there is so much to the opinions in Graham, and because there may be tens of thousands of defendants serving actual LWOP or functional LWOP sentences, I have a feeling that this new post archive will get filled up quickly.  And for this first post in this archive, I have decided to use the tasty term Graham crackers to describe what I view to be the really deep and really hard (and thus really tasty) intellectual questions that necessarily follow the Court's landmark ruling in Graham.  1.  Rules versus standards:  Due in part to Chief Justice Roberts' especially interesting work in his concurrence, my first set of Graham cracker comments relate to the old law professor chestnut of "rules versus standard...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on May 17, 2010 (boomark / email).