Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution in the context of "Judiciary Act of 1789"

Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6–3 that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments, but that states can define who has an intellectual disability. At the time Atkins was decided, 18 of the 38 death penalty states exempted mentally disabled offenders from the death penalty.

Twelve years later in Hall v. Florida the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the discretion under which U.S. states can designate an individual convicted of murder as too intellectually incapacitated to be executed.

Powell v. Texas, 392 U.S. 514 (1968), was a United States Supreme Court case that ruled that a Texas statute criminalizing public intoxication did not violate the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The 5–4 decision's plurality opinion was by Justice Thurgood Marshall. Justice Hugo Black and Byron White each wrote separate concurring opinions while Justice Abe Fortas dissented.

The United States Constitution contains several provisions regarding the law of criminal procedure.

Petit jury and venue provisions—both traceable to enumerated complaints in the Declaration of Independence—are included in Article Three of the United States Constitution. More criminal procedure provisions are contained in the United States Bill of Rights, specifically the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments. With the exception of the Grand Jury Clause of the Fifth Amendment, the Vicinage Clause of the Sixth Amendment, and (maybe) the Excessive Bail Clause of the Eighth Amendment, all of the criminal procedure provisions of the Bill of Rights have been incorporated to apply to the state governments.