Constitutionality aside, it isn’t smart.
Make a rape punishment equal to a murder punishment - however far up and down the scale you go - and you risk dead rape victims instead of live ones.
I don’t think the Supreme Court ought to judge the wisdom of laws though, only their constitutionality.
That is my only reservation.
Of course, in my ideal realm, child rape victims would be told when they get old enough that there is a secret clause that would allow them to kill the rapist if he ever got out. 
For serial child rapists? Definitely. I don’t want to risk having them pardoned or escaping and continuing their reign of terror.
That might be a logical thing that a Doper would think of, but do you really think that there are pedophiles in Louisiana who are raping little girls, and then sitting back and thinking to themselves, “Well, I probably should kill the little bitch because she could testify against me and since I can get the death penalty either way, I’m in a pickle!”
These sick fucks aren’t smart enough to think that way. Now, I would agree with you if we had a death penalty for insider trading or something like that…
I don’t think intelligence affects the likelihood of becoming a child rapist. At least not enough to say that none of them are smart enough to try and cover up their crimes.
Declaration - not Constitution. People confuse them all the time. One is the highest law of the land. The other is a list of why we became a nation after years of tyranny.
Huge pet peeve of mine. Sorry if I sound shrill.
Declaration - not Constitution. Please, people… they are both short reads…
Please?!?!
I’ve always thought their primary concern was that someone who really ticks off a particular politician or judge–or, worse, is arrested and tried for political reasons–doesn’t get an especially bad deal. That is, I thought the “unusual” part applied more to, “Hey! None of the other inmates have to do cock pushups!”
Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, perhaps, but there are quite a few things punishable by death under the UCMJ that would never fly for civilian crimes, especially in time of war, like malingering, refusing to hop on your ship, or criticizing the President (that’s just off the top of my head, and one or two of them may be wrong). ETA: I also don’t know whether or not civilians can be executed for treason.
Is what I keep saying. It can provide some element of context, but it has no binding legal authority. The Constitution is the legal document.
People confuse these two and then hand wave away the difference. It’s not insignificant. I don’t see people quoting the Articles of Confederation… it’s as contextual as the Declaration…
Nope. Sorry. Not going to happen. You want people to actually read these very short documents before throwing around words like “unconstitutional?”
Not going to happen. I’ve been trying for years. What you need to understand is that in modern parlance, “that’s unconstitutional” means “I really, really don’t fancy that.” After you realize that, everything makes sense.
For anyone who does take the trouble to read it, here is a secret method of determining if something is unconstitutional: Does the Constitution forbid it? No? Then it’s not.
No charge for the advice, folks.
Yup, the Rosenbergs were killed in '53 for that.
And they used to hang horse thieves. Now you probably can get probation for that.
After re-reading my earlier posts, it looks like I was wandering off into hijack territory anyway, so I apologize for that. I know that the Declaration of Independence holds no legal authority; I just thought it could offer some useful context.
As for the constitutionality of the DP for child rape - if the SC ruled that it was cruel and unusual punishment for “rape of an adult woman”, then why take a different stance on it regarding “rape of a child”? (And I assume we’d have to re-visit the whole thing again when the question changes to “rape of an adult man”?) What’s the point of making this distinction?
Actually the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage, not treason. Both are punishable by death, but treason requires two witnesses to the same overt act.
The Court has to (or should) define narrowly the question being presented to it. This is because of the Constitution’s “case or controversy” provision, which provides jurisdiction only to actual, live, ripe issues. This is to prevent courts from rendering “advisory opinions” on issues that aren’t presented in a particular case (not that this stops judges from doing that in some cases anyhow).
Okay, maybe you knew some or all of this, but the point is, this issue would be treated separately because the crimes are distinct (of course, someone could still decide that they were sufficiently analogous that the same conclusion should apply).
As for why to distinguish between child rape and adult rape, a first answer is, we have come to know that the S.C. often just makes crap up to suit their preferred outcome. In Bollinger, S.D. O’Conner pulled a bunch of from-the-whole-cloth crap out of her heinie to find one Michigan affirmative action policy illegal, and a near-identical one pretty kosher (or, kosher, but only, like, for maybe the next . . . 25 years or so). So, they feel free to just invent and disapparate rights and prohibitions on whim.
My rant aside, the concept of aggravating factors, which is inherently subjective, has long been acknowledged as properly relevant to whether a criminal is “death eligible.” One aggravating factor is whether a killer acted with a “depraved indifference toward human life” (wait – don’t most killers?). Another factor may turn on “heinousness.” Yet another (in some states) is whether the killer was “lying in wait.” Why is lying in wait to ambush your victim worse than marching right up to him? What is “heinousness” or “depraved indifference?” I can’t define those, but I can give some free advice: if you’ve already left the convenience store with all the cash, turning around, coming back in, and reaching over the counter to shoot the cowering clerk in the head is going to strike a lot of jurors as somehow even worse and more animalistic than if you shot him dead in the first moments of the robbery. Does that make sense to you? Maybe yes, maybe no, but human nature and the ick factor (which underlies a lot of decisions about crime and punishment) don’t have to make sense.
Even an activist Supreme Court has not had a problem with allowing these sort of subjective determinations that some crimes are “worse” (and can merit harsher punishment) than others very similar in nature. I can readily imagine a number of rationales on which a legislature would have concluded that while it’s f’d up to rape an adult woman, it’s really, really f’d up to rape a child, and that the latter could justify a harsher penalty.