The prisoners write in carefully lettered script or on old electric typewriters. There are sometimes grammatical errors or misspellings. But the language is direct. They describe facing Stage 4 cancer ...

Over the past decade, Minnesota's prisons have experienced officer assaults, lockdowns, and chronic staffing shortages. They have faced allegations of substandard medical care, inhumane living ...

A group of homeless plaintiffs argue that local laws aimed at banning sleeping outside violated their constitutional rights. The city claims that’s not what the Eighth Amendment means. By Abbie ...

"This trial win is significant because it upholds the Eighth Amendment, which is a difficult test. The punitive damages verdict sends a powerful message that the acts that took place here were extreme ...

We analyzed nearly 1,500 cases to obtain data on prisoner litigation. We found that constitutional protections have been dramatically weakened. In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of Supreme Court ...

Editor's note: This is a regular feature on issues related to the Constitution and civics education written by Paul G. Summers, retired judge and state attorney general. The U.S. Constitution is the ...

Six years ago, in Timbs v. Indiana, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a majority opinion that pointed out the origins of the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause and the original ...

So far this year, three False Claims Act defendants have challenged judgments against them based on the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Remarkably, two were successful, as the District ...

Oral argument before the Supreme Court this week showed why it is nonsense to claim that anti-vagrancy laws violate the Constitution‘s Eighth Amendment provision against “cruel and unusual punishment.