"Paul Weems was a disbursing officer in the Coast Guard when he was convicted of making a false entry in a government record book. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.
"According to the prosecutors, Weems had falsified “the cash book” of the Coast Guard by entering into an official payroll ledger that he had distributed a month’s wages to employees of two lighthouses when in fact he had not.
"Weems, for his part, claimed that he’d made a mistake in the data entry. The court, for its part, found no proof that he’d attempted to defraud the government. But he and the unpaid lighthouse employees and the prosecutors and the judge all happened to live in a different century— the crime occurred in 1904—and in a different country: the Philippines. There and then, the punishment for such an offense was administered by way of an ancient tradition called cadena temporal—“cadena” is the Spanish word for “chain”—and the defendant was sentenced not only to pay a large fine, but also to serve 15 years of “hard and painful labor,” including “the carrying of chains, deprivation of civil rights during imprisonment, and thereafter perpetual disqualification to enjoy political rights.”
"Weems appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court—which was possible only because the Philippine islands were then an American colony. What followed was a landmark 1910 ruling that would help shape a century’s worth of jurisprudence. Justice McKenna, writing for the High Court, said in sum that the punishment didn’t fit the crime. Fifteen years of forced hard labor, bound ankle to wrist in chains, simply wasn’t proportionate to the offense of fudging a payroll ledger.
"Such punishment was, the Court ruled, “cruel and unusual,” and therefore violated the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
"The Eighth Amendment—at least the proscription against “cruel and unusual punishment”—seems to be the one part of the Bill of Rights that every middle schooler who has faced a parentally imposed grounding—or had their social media privileges revoked—knows by heart. (The full line reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”)
"And this precept of justice has a venerable pedigree, tracing back to the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, and before that to the English Bill of Rights in 1689, and before that to English common law, and before that to the lex talionis, and to Leviticus (as framed by the rule, “an eye for an eye”), and to the Code of Hammurabi, and probably to early episodes of The Flintstones.
"The precise parameters may still be debated (we continue to squabble over the death penalty, drug laws, and more), but the concept itself is mostly embedded in a common ethic.
"I thought of this as I, and the rest of the nation, and the world, heard the wailing of children being separated from their parents at America’s southern border—as we learned of 10-year-olds and toddlers being held in makeshift detention centers, of mothers and fathers not knowing where their children were.
"...One thing we can do to lessen the cruelty and unfairness of the planet, he said, is simply to bring ourselves closer to it. “When we allow ourselves to be shielded and disconnected from those who are vulnerable and disfavored,” said Stevenson, we allow injustice to fester. What we need instead is proximity to that suffering. “Proximity is a pathway” to justice, and to kindness, and to healthier communities.
"The closer we are to one another, in other words, the harder it is to be cruel."
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