Cruel and unusual punishment
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Cruel and unusual punishment constitutional
Punishments that are barbaric or grossly disproportionate to the crime. The Eighth Amendment forbids them.
Technical: The Eighth Amendment bar on cruel and unusual punishments; doctrine considers both inherently barbaric methods and disproportionality.
Founding-era note: The phrasing is taken almost verbatim from the English Bill of Rights (1689); founding-era meaning is a live originalist question about which punishments were 'unusual' in 1791.
A dictionary entry is reference: it describes how a term is used. It is not itself binding law. Why that matters →
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