Each year in advance of Constitution Day, Sept. 17, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics releases a film as part of its award-winning series designed to engage high school students in learning about facets of the U.S. Constitution. Available on Annenberg Classroom, this year’s new film explains the origins and nature of the Eighth Amendment’s protection against “cruel and unusual punishment” for those convicted of crimes.
What makes a punishment cruel or unusual? Who decides, and how? The film answers those questions by tracing the United States’ evolving stance toward the application of the death penalty to juvenile offenders.
Produced in partnership with The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, “The Eighth Amendment: Cruel and Unusual Punishment” is among the over 65 free, nonpartisan, high-quality short films available to educators, students, and families on Annenberg Classroom.
“When the founders utilized the term ‘cruel and unusual,’ they were looking at two different concepts,” Marsha Levick, chief legal officer of the Juvenile Law Center and an adjunct professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School, explains at the start of the film. “Cruel” punishments are those that inflict pain, like torture, or sentences out of proportion to the crime. “Unusual” punishments are those that a society recognizes as unacceptable.
This language, says Christina Swarns, executive director of the Innocence Project and former litigation director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, creates a “continuous commitment” to make sure that “when we punish someone, it is consistent with the beliefs of our country.”
The film demonstrates this commitment in action in the case of the death penalty for juvenile offenders. Juveniles were long treated differently from adults in the American criminal justice system: juvenile courts were typically more forgiving, and juveniles were rarely sent to death row. But when crime spiked in the 1980s and 1990s, this changed as some states began treating juvenile offenders like adult ones in an effort to deter crime, in the process putting the death penalty for them in the mix. When the harsher penalties were challenged in Stanford v. Kentucky in 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that executing juveniles did not violate the Eighth Amendment because states permitted it. According to the country’s “evolving standards of decency,” executing juveniles had become decent.
As time went by, however, scientific advances in the understanding of the adolescent brain revealed that juveniles had worse impulse control and less understanding of potential consequences than adults, and the idea that they could not be held responsible for their actions in the same way as adults took hold. In 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court found that applying the death penalty for crimes committed as juveniles was “cruel and unusual” once again.
On Constitution Day (September 17), the film will be screened at “America’s Most Historic Prison,” the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site at 11 a.m., 12 p.m., 1 p.m., and 3 p.m., with guided discussions facilitated by Eastern State educators. A livestream panel discussion focused on the themes in the film will take place at 2 p.m. (click here to register for the livestream program).
Watch the film on YouTube or on Annenberg Classroom.
Annenberg Classroom provides resources for middle and high school students and features a library of videos that includes conversations with Supreme Court justices, interactive games, a guide to the Constitution, and other resources. Award-winning films in The Constitution Project series include:
- “The First Amendment: Student Freedom of Speech”
- “Second Amendment: C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago“
- “Freedom of Assembly: National Socialist Party v. Skokie”
- “The 19th Amendment: A Woman’s Right to Vote”
- “Freedom of the Press: New York Times v. United States”
- “Yick Wo and the Equal Protection Clause”
- “Korematsu and Civil Liberties”
