EIGHTH AMENDMENT--CAPITAL SENTENCING INSTRUCTIONS.

This article discusses the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that the Texas capital sentencing statute did not violate the Eighth Amendment rights of petitioner Dorsie Lee Johnson, Jr. The Eighth Amendment requires the level of punishment for a crime to be directly proportional to a defendant's moral culpability. Under the Amendment, the jury must be able to consider fully all of a defendant's preferred mitigating evidence as it related to his moral culpability. The Amendment to the Constitution provides that excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. To protect against the risk of arbitrary and capricious death penalty sentences, the Court concluded that the Amendment requires states to channel the discretion of sentencing juries through appropriate statutory schemes. In response to the evolving capital punishment jurisprudence of the Court, Texas adopted a unique capital sentencing scheme. The scheme limited the application of capital punishment to intentional and knowing murders committed in six situations. The statute instructed the sentencer to answer three special issues to determine whether the defendant should be sentenced to death.