I don’t think that’s true in the USA - the idea that the application of the punishment rather than the punishment itself can make it cruel and unusual is the essence of the famous Furman v Georgia decision of the US Supreme Court in 1971 which led to a de facto moratorium on the death penalty until the late 1970s. What’s more eg in Coker v Georgia in 1977 the US Supreme Court ruled that rape of an adult woman was insufficient to qualify for the death penalty.
Well like I said below I maybe hoping for something that doesn't exist. I assume enough legal action has taken place to figure this out but I wouldn't really know. However, I agree that the application of the punishment rather than the punishment itself can be cruel and usual (depending on how the punishment is defined). I fail to see how the second case example relates if the first is true.
What is cruel or unusual seems unrelated to the crime severity because cruel and unusual is a separate concept like the first example seems to show or so I thought. Crime severity and severity of the punishment should be related though.
This is why, in my opinion, solitary confinement can be called might be cruel and unusual. It's categorically different from prison.
I hope any of that makes sense.
Maybe I'm hoping for a more thoughtful legal system than is actually in place. While your example would be unusual it's only unusual now. Meaning you're basing what what is usual on the length of the prison sentence can gradually increased over time as long as it never appears to be usual compare to the "current mean". Much of this is legislated which implies to me that unusual would fall outside of what has been legislated.
Forcing someone to eat a box of baking soda would be unusual to me because it's in a totally different category of punishment. Like fining, community service, or death instead of prison.
Would you please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've done it quite a bit already, and we're trying for better than that here:
If the massive success of air travel in the US, which Boeing is a part of, is a product of 21st-century capitalism, THEN SIGN ME UP FOR MORE OF THAT!
This article seems a bit myopic.
The massive success was in the 20th century, the 21st has been a massive annoyance because of the loss of rights and privacy.
The interesting thing to me is that Boeing seems to have completely failed to restrain management pressure to perform economically and went right past the acceptable performance boundary (dynamic safety model).
Even an allegedly high reliability organization was not able to escape bean counting in the end. It would seem that capitalism's typical obsession with profit can't be reconciled with reliability on the long term.
Corporations and capitalism are different things. Capitalism is composed of a constant churn of organizations which are all failing at different rates. The point is that the system as a whole is not reliant upon the continual success of any of them. In a planned economy, the entire system depends on a single institution remaining competent indefinitely.
I know these people. Some are family. I live in the Cinci metro. This article illustrates the reality of life for what I think is most of the country. They are constantly on the edge of financial ruin. Living everyday under that kind of stress is hard and hard to watch.
