Legislation to expand use of the death penalty would be a major step backward for Missouri

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Missouri’s Senate Bill 196 is a dangerous throwback to a bygone era of criminal justice.

The bill aims to make certain crimes where no death occurred, such as child sex abuse and child sex trafficking, eligible for the death penalty — a direct violation of the 8th Amendment as established in the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court case Kennedy v. Louisiana.

But Senate Bill 196 isn’t just about overturning one Supreme Court decision.

It’s part of a broader movement to dismantle decades of constitutional protections under the 8th Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment. If successful, it could lead to the return of automatic death sentences and even the execution of vulnerable defendants, including children and the intellectually disabled, and open the door to arbitrary sentencing that masks lynch-mob style racism.

In challenging the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision, Senate Bill 196 proponents would have Missouri join Florida and Tennessee in bringing back the death penalty for statutory rape and similar crimes. This movement seeks to repeal not just the Supreme Court decision, but a line of cases recognizing that the Framers understood the 8th Amendment should “draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

This line of cases started in 1958, when the court recognized that while we used to summarily execute wartime deserters, an American draftee who went AWOL for a matter of hours in a foreign land in the waning days of World War II could not be stripped of his U.S. citizenship — a punishment based on a pre-Civil War statute.

A national consensus had emerged that such punishment was disproportionate to the crime, making it cruel and unusual.

This understanding of the 8th Amendment has been the foundation for categorical rules limiting punishments for certain types of cases and defendants.

A 1977 case held that rape of an adult not resulting in death is categorically ineligible for death, reflecting the problematic “southern rape cases” in which Black men were sentenced to death for the rape of white women, the holding the Kennedy decision would later extend.

A pair of cases decided in 1982 and 1987 created the rule that a defendant who did not personally cause the death of the victim is only death-eligible if the defendant was a major participant in the underlying felony and recklessly ignored the foreseeable risk of death.

Decisions in 2002 and 2005 established categorical exemptions from the death penalty for intellectually disabled individuals and juveniles. The court also relied on this approach outside of capital cases, in 2010 and 2012 decisions prohibiting life without parole for juveniles convicted of non-homicide crimes and requiring individualized sentencing for juvenile homicide offenders.

These decisions reflect a growing consensus that the harshest punishments must be reserved for the worst of the worst.

If states succeed in dismantling the 8th Amendment’s protections, the consequences will be devastating. Imagine a return to the days when racial biases permeated death penalty decisions, as seen in the tragic case of George Stinney, a 14-year-old Black boy executed in 1944.

That Senate Bill 196 is part of this broader effort is not speculation. Missouri’s Attorney General has signed onto a brief  in a case from Alabama attacking the court’s requirement that intellectual disability be determined in keeping with current clinical practices, and explicitly attacking the entire line of “evolving standards of decency” cases.

Senate Bill 196 is likely part of an ever broader movement to carry out President Donald Trump’s executive order that seeks “overruling of Supreme Court precedents that limit the authority of state and federal governments to impose capital punishment.”

Florida’s recently enacted “Trump Act,” which proposes automatic death sentences for certain offenders, would challenge foundational cases which rejected automatic death penalty statutes and required case-by-case weighing of any mitigating evidence related to the circumstances of the crime or the character of the defendant.

Senate Bill 196 invites a future where the state wields the ultimate punishment with alarming arbitrariness.

The people of Missouri deserve a criminal justice system that reflects our progress, not one that drags us backward. Senate Bill 196 is a step in the wrong direction.

This post was originally authored and published by Joseph C. Welling from Missouri Independent via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.