We the People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

The Eighth Amendment. What is cruel and unusual punishment? Who gets to define and decide its boundaries? And how did the Constitution's authors imagine it might change? Today on Throughline's We the People: the Eighth Amendment, the death penalty, and what cruel and unusual really means. This episode was originally published in January 2025.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	There's a lot of news happening. You want to understand it better, but let's be honest, you don't want it to be your entire life either. Well, that's sort of like our show, here and now anytime. Every weekday on our podcast, we talk to people all over the country about everything from political analysis to climate resilience, video games. We even talk about dumpster diving on this show. Check out here and now anytime, a daily
0:21.6	podcast from NPR and WBUR. A note before we get started, this episode includes descriptions and
0:28.2	discussion of violent acts, including murder and execution.
0:45.6	Okay. Utah, 1877.
0:50.2	A man named Wallace Wilkerson stops by a saloon.
0:57.0	He starts by playing a game of cards with another man named William Baxter. An argument starts.
1:00.0	Wilkerson takes out a gun, shoots Baxter in the head, killing him, and then he flees.
1:15.7	Wilkerson is captured. A few months later, he's convicted of murder and sentenced to be
1:21.6	executed the next month. Utah was not yet a state. It was a federal territory, and it was settled then, as now, by Mormons.
1:31.1	And Brigham Young, who was the leader of the Mormons, preached that blood atonement was necessary for murders.
1:39.8	So he didn't want to use hanging because you don't bleed when you're hanged, but you do bleed when you're shot.
1:46.7	And so Mormon territory used the firing squad as a form of execution.
1:57.4	Wilkerson was sentenced to be executed by a firing squad, a sentence that was challenged all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had to decide whether a firing squad violated Wallace Wilkerson's Eighth Amendment rights.
2:13.3	All right, here's the original text of the Eighth Amendment.
2:17.8	Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
2:28.8	Cruel and unusual punishments.
2:31.2	A term that was adopted from England and meant to protect the people from a tyrannical government.
2:37.3	But what was cruel and unusual punishment?
2:41.3	So what's interesting, the court first says, very hard to know what this means.
2:46.0	But then they go on to say, the one thing we can say with some certainty is that it had something to do with
2:50.8	torture, that torture's not good. And they reference things that they would be pretty sure
2:58.1	would be cruel and unusual punishment. Drawing and quartering, disemboweling, burning at the
	...

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