The Death Penalty and the Eighth Amendment Is the death penalty consistent with the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against the imposition of cruel and unusual punishment? This essay will address this question and present a brief history of the death penalty in America. The Supreme Court examined particular applications of the death penalty in the 1940s and 1950s. In each case he supported state action without addressing the broader question of the constitutionality of the death penalty. In the 1960s, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, led by Professor Anthony Amsterdam, launched a full-scale attack on the death penalty. By adopting a "moratorium strategy", the LDF managed to halt all executions for five years, creating a "death row impasse". their application. Most observers of the time concluded that there would never be an execution in the United States again. They were wrong. In 1976, in the case Gregg v. Georgia, the Court upheld Georgia's new capital sentencing procedures, concluding that they had sufficiently reduced the problem of arbitrary and capricious imposition of death associated with prior laws. The Court continued to address questions regarding the application of the death penalty: to non-murderers, to minors, to mentally disabled prisoners, to racial minorities. One such case is McCleskey v. Kemp, a challenge based on a study that showed that killers of white victims were much more likely to be sentenced to death than killers of black victims. The Eighth Amendment states: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive bail fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted (Constitution). How is this reconciled with the reality of the facts of capital punishment:1. The average inmate executed in 1998 spent ten years and ten months on death row.2. In 1998, 285 people were sentenced to death.3. At the end of 1999, Texas had the largest number of prisoners on death row (39), followed by California (31), Alabama, and Florida (25 each). Over 3,500 prisoners are currently on death row.5. Thirty-nine states have death penalty laws in effect. One of the most eloquent attacks on the death penalty ever delivered in an American court came in the Leopold & Loeb case of 1924. Clarence Darrow's eloquence is often credited with saving the lives of two people. Confessed teenage killers.