Judge: 13-year-old girl gets lighter sentence if her ponytail gets cut off

[AnotherMcIntosh]

32. Under a literal reading (which you imply is the only appropriate interpretation), the 8th Amend

does not prohibit punishments that were in existence in the colonies at the time that the Bill of Rights was adopted, such as the flogging of seamen in the U.S. Navy and the burning of witches which had occurred earlier.

Under such reasoning, such punishments would be cruel but would not be prohibited because they would not be both "cruel and unusual."

Of all the Justices sitting on the Supreme Court throughout history, only one ever took a literalist approach to any provision within the Bill of Rights, and even then he applied his literalist approach to the First Amendment: Justice Black.

The phrase "cruel and unusual" is traceable back to the comparable language used in England in the 1600's. There is a historical context for it. The courts have repeatedly interpreted the word "and" in the disjunctive in a number of court opinions. There is nothing, other than your interpretation, to indicate that the courts would only interpret the word "and" in the conjunctive with respect to a case in which the Eighth Amendment is at issue.