At the Bottom of the Document As the judge pushes up his glasses, he scrolls down to the eighth amendment, and

there lay on old rippled paper and in inky black print states as he reads out loud: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. The sound of the judges voice rings in the court, as its importance and meaning hangs in the air. This is a significant amendment because if there was not this amendment, then we would be killing and penalizing people unfairly. Mandatory Sentencing is when you automatically get sentenced to penalty, even without a trial, and I believe this is unfair. I believe this Amendment has a meaning, not one you might find in a dictionary, but a true almost an opinion definition. The eighth amendment protects cruel and unusual punishment, and I dont think any one should suffer something like that, and even of you have done a crime before, you dont get a trial in Mandatory Sentencing. I believe importance means to have a purpose or a meaning to it. The purpose of this amendment is to protect people from suffering the cruel and unusual punishments. The First Amendment was added to the Constitution to stand as a guarantee that neither the power nor the prestige of the Federal Government would be used to control, support or influence the kinds of prayer the American people can say - that the people, says Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Hugo Black. This quote means that this amendment was made to control and support our American citizens. Since 1986-1997 the average sentencing has gone up, and it is about 8.1 million people. This means more and more people are going to jail. This proves my point that if this was not in progress there would be even more people going to jail, and some might be innocent then it would get uncontrollable. I think the fact that judges dont have a say could be a good thing because they didnt do enough punishment the first two times they did something wrong, so it might be better to just take care of them. If the United States did not have this amendment, things would probably get out of control. First of all, people would be punished with cruel and unusual punishments and I dont think anyone should have to deal with that, even if they did a top degree crime, they should not have to suffer. Second of all, judges would get too much power.

http://www.usconstitution.net/const.pdf

https://www.google.com/search? client=safari&rls=en&q=hugo+black&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF-8 http://www.usconstitution.net/const.pdf