The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

The recent Supreme Court decision about killing kids was determined to fall under the "cruel and unusual" umbrella. It got me thinking that the semantic make up of that term is pretty misleading.

In order for a punishment to be unjust it must be both cruel and unusual. It follows, therefore, that a punishment that is recognized as cruel, yet is not deemed unusual is an acceptable punishment.

For example, clearly capital punishment is cruel. Killing someone is probably the least nice thing one can do. Yet it is not considered unusual to kill someone for committing a murder. It is, for what ever reason, considered unusual to kill a mentally deficient murderer. I guess the idea is that they don't understand that you shouldn't kill people. I suppose the same is true of 17 year old murderers.

There are tons of acceptable punishments that are cruel and usual. Solitary confinement. mandatory drug sentences, the Patriot Act. I think the whole thing was designed to leave room for debate, but in the end it just adds to the beaurocracy.

They should just design a spectrum of punishments according to heinoussness, like the terror alert level, and put any and all viable punishments somewhere on the scale. Then we would know how mean we can be to people. And of course by "we" I mean enforecement agents.